The Mind Palace Minotaur
by Not Poignant
Summary: Trauma reaches for Sherlock in odd ways, after The Great Game. It finds him in his mind palace, and destroys years of research. And Sherlock doesn't know how to fight this, or what to do when deleted memories start coming back. Asexual!Sherlock
1. Chapter 1

**The Mind Palace Minotaur**

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WARNINGS: Sherlock whumpage, hurt/comfort, angst, abuse and rape. John/Sherlock (but no magical healing sex, sorry).

SPOILERS: Everything up to and including _The Great Game._

Author's Note: This will be multi-chaptered, and probably alternate between viewpoints (though I haven't decided yet, it's early days). PTSD frequently manifests in non-standard ways, and while Sherlock will meet the requirements for pretty much all of the diagnostic symptoms, his unique personality traits and developmental adaptations create a situation where he's completely ill-equipped to deal with what's happening (indeed, as many people are in the early days of PTSD). I like whump in general, but Sherlock whump makes me inordinately pleased. My apologies!

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**01**

He wandered down the peaceful corridor that stored the rooms that housed his information of the English countryside. He wanted to refresh his workable knowledge of the North Yorkshire Moors, specifically their flora. He didn't have time to do this during the day; too much to do, new things to learn, and so he maintained this general upkeep while he was dreaming.

He entered into a plain, rendered room filled with shelving units, filing cabinets, stacked high with books. The flora cabinet was off to his left and he made his way over, unrushed, unhurried, enjoying the actual setting itself. He'd constructed this room back when he was able to take considerably more time with visualisation, and this section of the mind palace was well-textured, the walls themselves containing information. The renders were made from dyes of carefully processed moorland plants; just looking at them helped him to remember those processes, prints – photographically memorised and stored were tacked onto the walls – the blueprints of the cottages on Percy Rigg. Biologically correct illustrations of the lapwing, the curlew, the delightfully named redshank.

The first drawer in the filing cabinet opened easily, and he pulled out a file on sphagnum moss bogs, carefully scanning the information pages. When sleeping, he could enjoy moments of information for the sake of information. His body slumbered and shifted, useless and dull, but his mind was still active. Not conscious, but still dedicated to The Work.

Each of the pages was ordered neatly, and he lost time, maybe even a couple of hours refreshing his knowledge. He almost didn't hear the noise the first time, so absorbed in the processes of sleep and dreaming. But he did hear it, and on a massive time delay, many minutes later, he lifted his head and narrowed his eyes. This was _his _space. Strange things didn't happen here unless he wanted them to. His mind palace was utterly inviolate. He'd made it that way. The body was unpredictable, and the mind had its messy spaces that he preferred to avoid; the finicky, maudlin basal ganglia, even the limbic system. Give him the clean and ordered spaces of his own neocortex.

The noise came again, a clattering, something shifting in a nearby room. He carefully replaced the folder and stood up, feeling an unusual chill shift over his entire body. He looked down at the hairs that had risen on his forearms. Piloerection, _goosebumps. _Rolled his eyes. His subconscious was choosing to let him know that his sympathetic system was activated. Fear was so tedious.

He mastered himself quickly and strode down the corridor towards the source of the noise. He could hear other noises now, quieter shuffling and other movements. He'd stored no memories of the movements of live animals in these rooms, but he supposed that as he got older, perhaps they were able to escape and make their way elsewhere. He dismissed this thought for its frivolity, and because the idea that his brain might degenerate as he aged was repellent to him. His body shifted restlessly as he slept on.

He opened the door, and froze when he saw a figure bent over a desk, rifling through one of his folders in the room dedicated to the Peak District. Several things occurred to him at once. A Westwood suit, navy blue, _Moriarty, _immaculate, busy fingers but no real absorption in what he was looking at, clearly waiting for him them, making a mess.

'Is this really all that useful?' Moriarty held up a folder on limestone. 'Why not delete any of this...redundant information? There's so much _more _you could be storing in here. By the way, hi!' He straightened and dropped the folder casually behind him. Pages fell out, scattered everywhere. Sherlock flinched, felt his breathing coming faster, wanted rationality even in unconscious states. But he did not want to believe what he was seeing. Several things occurred to him at once, but the most rational was that his mind had conjured a Moriarty. That his mind had conjured an accurate rendition of a man who should not have the power to make him feel this way.

His mind palace was no longer inviolate, and his own mind had trespassed upon him. It created a queasiness in his stomach, and stuck in his throat.

'Put it all back once you're done, please.' Sherlock said crisply, and then turned to walk away, and found that he couldn't. The compulsion to know Moriarty, even now, to find out how kindred they really were, pressed against him. It sent small thrills of adrenaline rushing through his body.

'But I don't want to,' Moriarty pouted, 'that takes _time, _and I'm looking for something,' he paused dramatically, 'important.' He half-smiled. 'But I got distracted with all this useless, dull information. Plants? Really? When are you going to _grow up _and realise there are more important things to be storing. But never mind, I've fixed it for you, the only puzzle for you to figure out, my dear, is which room is going to go boom first.'

'What?' Sherlock said, his heart racing now. He looked around, like he could somehow make it out. And then Moriarty laughed as Sherlock closed his eyes and did a quick scan, a computer program flipping through all the rooms by category to see if anything was out of the ordinary. Searching for some blip in his consciousness, something that would feel wrong. Where? Where? Where?

He was too late.

The boom shook his mind, rattled his whole body before he could finish the scan, and he fell to his knees aware that something horrifying had just happened to a whole section of his palace. No order now, nothing but fragmented words and pictures, nonsensical, disordered, bits and bytes polluting the pristine organisation. He gasped, and then gasped again, and shuddered when Moriarty leaned down next to him and he felt that calculating smile against his own ear.

'Well, there we are. Going to be waiting for you, the next time you sleep,' he finished in a singsong voice. 'My bombs are going to be waiting too. I have so many delicious _surprises _up my sleeve, and look at you, it's so flattering to see that you know it too. Wake up, then, Sherlock!'

He snapped awake with a jagged, rasping cry. His hands clutched at the blanket, his eyes stared up at the ceiling and he threw himself out of bed like it was a nest of vipers. He felt disoriented, his brain felt bruised, an unusual headache sprouting from the back of his head and pulsing along the nerves all the way to his eyes. He placed a hand over his face and waited for it to pass. It didn't.

_Just a dream, _he started to tell himself, but if there was one thing research had taught him, the brain was incredibly capable of self-sabotage. And he knew. He could _feel _it. Something was wrong with his mind palace. It could take weeks to fix.

The betrayal felt sickening and too dirty to be borne, so he withdrew into a different section of his mind and forgot to talk for three days, absorbed in a case, and reluctant to sleep.

He was only vaguely aware of John hovering nearby, concerned, observing. He had nothing to say. He knew he was feeling something close to doubt, maybe even doubt itself, and the idea was so repulsive that he cushioned himself with the Work. It made Lestrade happy, and it gave him something to do, and he loathed self-awareness in a way that made Mycroft remind him of it with a delicious glee. He didn't even want to think about Mycroft right now. He couldn't help it. Mycroft was better at assessing people, and he was curious to know what he'd think, but certainly not curious enough to ask.

He started occasionally checking the computer (his or John's, it didn't matter), for sightings of Moriarty. It wasn't that he was worried, per se, he just wanted to _know _what was going on. Dimly he knew that he was trying to regain control over something that was happening inside of him, and that he was probably going about it all wrong.

The headache lasted for three days. At the end of the third day, as it crept towards 2.00am, John walked out of the lounge into the kitchen, and came back with a glass of water and two painkillers. 'At least take something for your head,' he said, thrusting them towards Sherlock.

Sherlock only shook his head in irritation, as though a fly was trying to land on it.

'Sherlock.' John said, in that 'I am going to be stubborn and annoying and eventually I might even win this altercation,' manner that Sherlock found frustrating at times and endearing at others. Now it was just a nuisance.

'John. I am thinking. I do not need painkillers. If you've used your incredible insight to deduce I have a headache, maybe you could please take it one step further and realise that it's only minor, and that if I needed your help, I would have demanded it by now.'

'Yes, of course, because that's so like you, to look after yourself when you're in one of these moods. Look, will you just humour me and take them?' He held up the painkillers, shoved the glass of water forwards.

Sherlock glowered at him, and then seized the painkillers and swallowed them, drank back the water. Even that simple movement of shifting his head made the pain throb a bit, and he winced. John noticed, his eyes widened, but he didn't say anything. He took back the glass that Sherlock thrust at him.

'Thank you.'

'Now go away.' Sherlock said, but instead of waiting for John to leave, he walked to his own room instead, closed the door behind him. He stood there for a moment, lost. He looked at all the familiar sights and everything felt slightly off and alien, like he was a stranger in his own space. This was unbearable, it chafed at him like sandpaper, and he threw himself down onto his bed and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes.

Partly, he was tempted to explore his mind palace again, to find the source of the damage and see what could be salvaged. He also wanted to see Moriarty again, feeling a strange pull to the man, yet vexed with the knowledge that the Moriarty in his head was not real, was only his perception of the spider himself. And then he didn't want to see the damage, because it would confirm that something had gone wrong. Something had backfired in his mind.

He thought, or suspected that he knew the reasons. The most unusual thing that had happened to him in some time was that he had invited a flatmate into his house and actually ended up enjoying his company. The second was that he had seen this man's life in danger, and had felt utterly powerless to do anything about it. The third was those few seconds, those few horrendous seconds, when he was certain that this man was Moriarty, and standing there in the pool, had felt bile rising in the back of his throat as his brain raced and raced and raced and didn't come to the right conclusion before his needy lizard brain whispered, 'he's got you, he's betrayed you, you foolish, foolish man.'

He knows these things, but he doesn't like to think about them. He knows he's human, but it's a frustrated knowledge. All the things the body needs that take time; how annoying it is to have to sleep on a regular basis, to find it food, to enjoy companionship when he had so little of it growing up and had convinced himself it wasn't necessary. And now John, _John _reminding him that there was something nice and...warm about praise and patience and doing the things for him that he forgot to do. It left him feeling sick inside, and he didn't know why. But it didn't leave him feeling sick enough to kick John out.

It was all too difficult. Sherlock sighed and his hands ended up falling limply by the side of his head as he turned on his side. Three days without sleep, three days of the blasted headache, and his body is asserting itself again. Sleep, it says. Please just for a little while.

He has come up with several good reasons as to why sleep would be just a waste of time, when he sunk deep into slumber, his body taking over.

There was blackness for some time, the sleep necessary for rest and body function. The blackness passed until Sherlock was aware of a charred smell, and then details drift in. Floating bits of burnt paper which fill him with horror, he has never liked to see papers destroyed, much to everyone else's chagrin when the paper just pile up. And then he saw the rooms; blackened walls, bits of debris everywhere, two storeys taken out, at least six rooms. He looked down and saw a ripped piece of paper with a paragraph on parasites and makes a face at it. These rooms were _valuable. _This information was _necessary. _

He crouched down, picked up some papers and looked at them all. Nematodes, hookworms, roundworms, and none of it in its rightful place, the information haphazard. He clutched the papers angrily in his hands and walked briskly into another room, saw display cases cracked on the floors, information on jellyfish, cephalopods, the murkiness of squid ink.

He's furious. He threw the papers he's holding down, and then scratched at the back of his head absently.

This is ridiculous, he wanted to shout in his own head. This is unhelpful!

Moriarty walked out of a room casually, like he was there the entire time. He was holding a tiny black leather box, like the sort you might find an engagement ring in. Sherlock stared at it, his eyes widened. He knows that box, it's vaguely familiar. He thought he'd...

'I deleted that...' He said, on a breath.

'Did you?' Moriarty said, with his lilt implying doubt, 'but here it is, right in my hungry little fingers. I knew you'd come back, by the way. So lovely to see you.'

'Don't-' Sherlock said, an aborted attempt to stop Moriarty opening the box, but the man only held up an impatient hand.

'_Do,' _he breathed, almost lustfully, and then the box was open, and Sherlock was whisked back into a memory that he was certain, utterly _certain, _he'd deleted.

He stood there at the stables, watching his younger self organising the tack obsessively, running fingers over the leather, the bits, putting jars of liniment in their rightful place. He was back home, on break from school, and his hair was starting to lose some of its neatly cropped look, he worried a bottom lip between his teeth.

'Not like this,' Moriarty said, like some demented ghost of Christmas past, 'you have to _feel _it to really understand what's going on.'

'No, this is ridiculous, what is the use of all this-'

And just like that, he is his younger self, full of racing emotions he had tried to forget. He did not like this day. Not at all. Inside the excitement of being in the stables, but the disappointment that his horse was not there and had been taken out by his father. He was done with being bullied by the quiet, taciturn man, and school had given him plenty of experience with bullies. He was starting to think that while he'd always be the butt of jokes, he'd certainly never be lost for one liners to scathe those who would turn their attentions to him.

He was frightened, too. His mind speeding ahead and going back to all those times his father had been so impatient with him. So unhappy. Mycroft could barely do any wrong in his father's eyes, but Sherlock? What a disappointment. All that razor sharp intellect and for what? Wasting it on horses and fantasy books about pirates and adventure and swashbuckling. An endless disappointment.

He was only thirteen, he did not yet have a mind palace. He found school boring. He had commandeered an old, disused science room and started a fire. It had cost quite a bit of money. More endless disappointments for his father to contend with.

He heard the sound of his horse first, followed by the dismounting of his father, and braced himself.

The tall, grim man entered the stables and aside from a brief, dispassionate glance, didn't give his son another look. Instead he removed the saddle, the bridle, rested the riding crop against one of the stalls and then calmly walked up to his son and reached past him to take a brush off the shelf. No words were exchanged, no glances. Sherlock bristled at being treated as though he were invisible. Mycroft would have gotten a 'good day, son,' _something, _but Sherlock was treated like a non-entity. He loathed being made to feel invisible. He'd rather have the yelling, anything but the cold ostracism his father offered.

He waited several minutes, and then several minutes more, as his father careful rubbed down the great, black trakehner. The horse swung his head towards Sherlock a couple of times, ears forward, eyes warm. Made to even approach, but his father stopped him with a word, some pressure.

Twenty minutes had passed before he had gathered the courage to speak.

'Father,' Sherlock said, drawing himself up imperiously, 'this is my horse. Tiberius likes me best, and you have your own.'

His father paused, and then turned and looked at him. It was a long, measuring glance. And then he turned back to Tiberius. He lead him into his own stall, gave him several handfuls of oats and then put the brush back. Finally he turned and picked up the riding crop and tapped it evenly against his leg.

'You make no measurable income, therefore, you have nothing that is truly yours aside from that which we _allow _to be yours.' The tone was calm, but cold. Sherlock held fiercely onto his anger, fiercely onto _anything _which would allow him to be visible.

'You _allowed _Tiberius to be mine, father. I don't want you to ride him anymore, without...without asking me.' He damned himself then, damned himself for the pause that gave away his uncertainty. There was a tiny part of him that he never succeeded in totally squashing, and that tiny part tells him to run away, to lock himself in his rooms with his books, to just stop this. His father will yell.

But his father did not yell.

Instead, his father drew back an arm, and then hit him across the side of the head with the riding crop, as hard as he'd hit a horse in full gallop. _This is new, _Sherlock thought, as he stumbled backwards and his hand flew to his head, blood already pouring from the gash. Head wounds look nastier than they usually are, especially once stitched up and clotted, he knew. But it felt nasty. It felt like it might need stitching.

His father said nothing, but Sherlock is hit three more times with the riding crop in quick succession. The arm next. He's wearing a long-sleeved shirt but the crop bites through and soon blood seeps into the cut material and he's left braced weakly against the wall, a hand against is head, a hand on his arm. He stared up in horror at his father.

He expected some sort of final line, for his father always did like to have the last word. But he must have decided that the riding crop was eloquent enough, because he walked out of the stables, tapping it evenly against his leg, without another glance at his son.

It seemed in a single semester, his father had gone from barely contained impatience to outright contempt and dislike.

Sherlock listened to the shuddering breaths that he made, angry at himself, knowing that he'd started this and he could have just kept quiet and ridden any of the other horses and it would have been fine. He knew his wounds need to be tended to, but he doesn't want anyone to see, and he doesn't want to explain anything to the maids, or to Mycroft, or to Mummy. He can't go back to the house yet. He'll just stay here a while. His head throbbed, he felt like he might throw up. His arm is not so bad. Bleeding, yes, but a more tolerable pain.

When he walked into Tiberius' stall, he paused for a moment, frightened that his father might know he is doing this and burst in with the riding crop whipping through the air towards him. But then Sherlock took a deep breath, attempted to push it from his mind, and walked up to the great horse. He leaned against him as the animal chewed his oats. Tiberius swung his head sideways, snorted hot air at the young man, and then went back to eating.

Sherlock stood there, knew he'd have to clean blood off Tiberius' side now, because he's leaning his head against him and he can feel the wetness of it pressing back into his head.

And then just like that, he is separate again from the young Sherlock, and watching in a kind of sickened horror. He turned away from his younger self in abrupt denial, and that's worse, because there was Moriarty, smiling like he's watching a kind of demented children's show.

'Oh, well, _that _kind of explains a few things, doesn't it? I found a lot more of these. Do you want me to show you?'

'Why are you doing this? Why have I conjured you up in the first place? Why would you do this?' Sherlock asked, aware that he sounded inane, that he has wasted a question by asking it twice. Moriarty closed the box and the memory disappears around them, and he's back in the charred mess of this section of the mind palace. He can't undo the memory now, can't unsee it, and Moriarty is holding the box and doesn't look like he wanted to give it back.

'Me?' Moriarty said, all innocence and widened eyes, 'I didn't do anything. I've never smacked you with a riding crop, no matter how disobedient you've been. I like naughty, it's unpredictable and leads to ever so much fun. But oh, your father, he reminds me of someone, you know. Another dour, brilliant man I've met.'

'I want to wake up now.' Sherlock said to himself, because he's had enough. His head ached, his arm stung. This is ridiculous, he thought.

'Did he belt you again? He must have been driven to _distraction _with all your arrogance and misplaced intellect. I bet he was bored of you the minute he realised your nature. He must have hit you again. Tell me he did.'

'I want to wake up NOW!' Sherlock bellowed, and his mind shudders and shakes like it's trying, but it's not quite working. He's locked in. Sleep has him fixed in place and he doesn't know what to do, without a brilliant plan here where he is vulnerable and disarmed.

'You don't have to tell _me,' _Moriarty purred sweetly, 'I already know. He did, didn't he?' Unctuous voice now, rich and chocolatey, like seductive pillow talk. 'Over and over again. He did it once and then couldn't resist. And how did you choose between school and home at the holidays? And what did Mycroft do once he found it? I can't remember. Do tell me. It wasn't..._nothing, _was it?'

Sherlock snapped, he reached out to smash Moriarty down with his fists, to see him prone and lifeless on the floor.

Moriarty disappeared, and he woke up with a shaky cry of the sort he hadn't made in years. He's sweating and clammy and cold, he's kicked all the blankets off his bed, and he can still hear the echo of a laugh in the background. He knew his bedroom door was open by the lighting and could tell someone was standing in the frame and it's just too much sensory input and he puts his head in his hands.

'Uh-' John began, awkward and sensitive, _too much coddling, _but Sherlock can't look up and glare at him, because he felt like he was trying to hold his own head together. He felt that this might be the most important thing he could possibly do at this time.

'So,' John continued, softer and more sure. He walked into the room, came closer. Sherlock flinched and cursed ten times in his head because he knew John will have noticed because John _noticed _things like that. Though he thinks John will have no idea what it means.

'Easy, easy.' John said in a voice so gentle it tugged at something hard inside of Sherlock, and he almost lowered a hand to his chest to hold it in. 'You were having a...it was just a bad dream. It's over now.'

That measured voice, so even and patient. So _genuine. _So real that Sherlock thinks it has to be a lie. He squeezed his eyes shut and wondered if his brain was together now, if he's held it for long enough. He lowered hands that he tried to stop from shaking by balling them into fists. He looked up at John, and he saw the cant of the eyebrows (worry? Concern? Confusion?), the tousled hair (the nightmare was loud enough to wake him up then), the slightly raised hands (like approaching a wild animal), the careful stance. He groaned impatiently in the back of his throat.

'Yes, I'm perfectly aware that it was a bad dream and that it is over. Now if you're quite done stating the obvious I'd like to...' He couldn't go back to sleep, he knew that now, he's probably only slept for a few hours, but he _can't _go back to sleep. 'I need to get some work done.'

'Sherlock, what's been going on with you lately? You can talk to me, you know.'

'No, I c-' He stopped himself, frustrated that he even started a phrase that always ends up with disagreement from everyone else around him. He waits for John to say, 'yes, you can.'

'Maybe you can't.' John said. He had a measured gaze now, an assessing gaze. 'But I've never seen you quite like this before. And sometimes talking helps. Look, trust me, I know how shitty that advice is. I _know.' _He said, and Sherlock believed that he did, because every soldier must have heard 'you can talk to me,' from at least one professional at some stage or another.

'Do you need some sleeping tablets?' John said suddenly, and Sherlock turned it over in his mind. Did he? Would they help, or hinder? What if they made it harder for his body to wake up, but his dreams continued unabated? No, that was not a tolerable answer. He shook his head, a single jerk.

'John,' he said, a softer tone than he's used to using, like he's going to say something meaningful. John waited, patiently, and so does Sherlock, waiting for what he was going to say. But nothing came, and after a couple of minutes of both of them waiting it out in silence, he got up and walked past John, sat at the kitchen table and stared at the beakers and solutions and solvents. He was too tired to work, but he doesn't wish to sleep. So he stayed there, in that pained state, until John went back to his own room with a sigh.

He picked up the violin and then placed it back down again. His body was too tired, the music would not be as soothing if he heard all the mistakes his body made.

He slumped into his chair and pulled his legs up to his chest. He refused to be scared of himself like this, and if he says it in that strict, brash tone of voice, he can almost believe it.

When he fell asleep again, it was with an odd, unpredictable fear. He didn't know what was coming, and for once, he didn't want to know.


	2. Chapter 2

Author's Note: Kind of winging this fic, which isn't entirely like me, but I have a vague idea of where I'm taking it and that's better than nothing. Remember, reviews are all kinds of love, and have been proven to make me write more! *g*

John's perspective in this one. :)

**02**

John lay awake in bed. His shoulder throbbed, and even though he knew perfectly well that it was the shift in barometric pressure, preparing for rain and gloomy weather, it still reminded him too closely of clamouring noises and being jostled by medics and damnit he was the war doctor and it should've been him helping someone else and not someone else stuffing bandages into the hole in his arm and his mind kept tracking along in this way until he threw his legs over the edge of the bed and took a deep breath. He'd been woken up earlier to cries that were muffled through doors; distressed, deep cries that he'd never heard before. And he stumbled out of bed towards Sherlock's room even as his own brain tried to convince him he was in a flashback of his own, that the cries were an illusion left over from the war.

He tripped on clutter, and ended up standing in the doorframe, dazed now not by the grogginess of waking up, but by the sight before him. Sherlock, having a nightmare, rendered vulnerable and paralysed on his own bed. It struck him dumb, and by the time he wondered what he should do, Sherlock awoke with a jerk. And then he stood there, stupidly, for another few moments, wondering how he should broach this. Ignore it? No. He got so few windows into Sherlock's heart that he couldn't just walk away. Say something direct? No. What? He approached and was shocked as Sherlock flinched away from him, and then not shocked at all. Of course not.

He'd speculated that Sherlock had a difficult past before. Confirmation doesn't so much truly surprise him, as tug hard on his heart.

But still, _nightmares. _And the way he'd said John in the end, an appeal in that soft, slight voice. A tone he'd only heard once before, when Sherlock went to double check on Mrs. Hudson when she came down with pneumonia and John had come running down the steps behind him to make sure he wasn't accidentally callous. But John didn't want to pressure this strange, soft Sherlock with questions, knew how sacrilegious it could be to trespass on these moments, and in the end he saw that Sherlock had withdrawn and wasn't going to finish whatever he had started to say, and John went back to his room.

There the atmospheric pressure had shifted, his shoulder throbbed, and he decided trying to sleep again was ridiculous. He quirked a half smile when the rain started, heavy and cold. He eased a hand up to his sore shoulder and rubbed slowly. It didn't help.

He got up with a grunt and made his way into the lounge. He was surprised to see Sherlock there already, legs tucked up underneath his head, which had listed to the side. His closed eyes were moving rapidly as he slept, and his brow was drawn in a look of worry? Concern? John liked to think he was getting to know Sherlock, but he'd never seen the man have nightmares before. Certainly not twice in a night, no matter how difficult a case; even after Moriarty and the pool and the damned Semtex-that-was-not-really-Semtex; not like John's own fevered brain could ever convince him otherwise when he slept.

'Sherlock.' He said, swallowing down his sleep-wrecked voice and trying again. 'Sherlock, wake up.'

It was as though the words broke some kind of mind-mouth barrier in his colleague, his friend, and – in a strained voice – Sherlock replied to someone who wasn't there.

'This is tedious. This is just repetition now. Can't you do better?'

Who was he speaking to? It sounded like he was putting up a brave front, but John wasn't remotely convinced. A tension in the voice. That building frustration that he often witnessed when Sherlock was descending into one of his moods. And then Sherlock's face became surprised and harmed all at once, and John knew he was seeing panic. Panic he had only witnessed once before, at the pool.

'No. No! I del-'

A hoarse gasp, and then another, and Sherlock's fists clenched into the armrests. John couldn't stand watching anymore, and he stepped forward but then hesitated for a moment as his hand hovered pathetically over Sherlock's forearm. The second gasp decided him, and he reached down and grasped white-knuckled fingers and was surprised to feel the tremors that quivered in the ligaments beneath him.

Sherlock came awake with a sudden, silent jolt. His hand twisted quickly and grabbed John's at the wrist. And then John was arching his whole body sideways to adjust for the way his wrist had been wrenched. Pain blistered up his arm as the shaking hand crushed him.

'_Christ, _Sherlock! Get off me!'

The long, strong fingers let go immediately, as though burned on one of his experiments. John straightened and soothed his wrist like he had his shoulder earlier. He could hear Sherlock's breathing, and then seconds later, nothing at all. Sherlock must have heard it and masked it.

'You know I'm just going to worry like a mother hen until you tell me about it, right?' John said, shaking the feeling of crunched bones out of his wrist. He looked down at Sherlock, who stared at him, pale and...what, frightened? That didn't seem right. Perturbed, maybe. Still a highly unusual expression. He filed it for later; the tension in his open mouth, the way his left brow was pulled in further than his right, the slight squint in his eyes.

He stepped backwards and sat tiredly on the sofa that Sherlock regularly sulked on. He wanted to sit opposite him instead, in his own chair, but he appreciated space after his own nightmares and decided to offer the same to Sherlock.

Minutes passed in silence. John knew that Sherlock had heard him, but he also knew that the man wasn't inclined to give wordy responses in bleak moods, and perhaps that applied to his post-nightmare brain state as well.

'Sleeping tablets, what kind? Not restavit, surely.' Sherlock drawled, as though John had only just offered. 'Not Edinburgh eccies? By which I mean-'

'I know what you mean.' John said on a frown. Trust Sherlock to use a druggie's terminology for temazepam instead of its clinical term. They rarely talked about Sherlock's history with drugs, but it still came up in odd moments.

'Hardly worth the name they're given. And the rest are unbearable. Leaving one groggy and the body slow and pathetic for hours afterwards, brutalising the Circadian rhythm. Sedatives, John. And none of them satisfactorily designed to suppress nightmares. As you would know, I'm sure.'

Sherlock's voice has calmed, returned back to its knowledgeable, even cadence. When John looked up, Sherlock stared back at him, face impassive. John shrugged.

'I knew a lot of them were useless even before the nightmares started.'

'But you still tried.'

'Well, you know, no one likes nightmares.'

'You shouldn't wake me like that.' Sherlock said abruptly, as he thrust his legs down onto the floor and folded his arms across his chest, an oddly defensive posture. His eyes narrowed and he cocked his head as he scanned John slowly.

'Ah. Your shoulder pains you. So I didn't wake you up then?'

John grimaced.

'I take it we're not going to talk about any of this in a meaningful way? Just dance around the topic of you having a bad night now that you've dismissed the possibility of medication?'

Sherlock said nothing, only glowered and then slid his eyes sideways and repeatedly read a list of titles stacked on one of the tables nearby. John rubbed his eyes tiredly and decided that he had very little to lose by being direct.

'You were telling someone to do better. And then seemed...upset. You were telling someone 'no.' Telling them that you deleted something?' John trailed off and pursed his lips as his brain slotted some puzzle pieces together. It didn't have the same brilliance and shine as Sherlock's deductions, but John had gotten along perfectly well with his own brain before he'd met the man, and it was doing just fine for him now.

'Sherlock, are you, did you dream of something you'd deleted? Is that it?'

The man didn't react, but John knew that was a reaction of itself. Pretend the question hasn't been asked by ignoring it completely and betraying no expression.

'Nonsense, John,' Sherlock said, after a few more minutes had passed. 'It doesn't work that way. Once I've deleted something, it's gone. Fragments lost in the ether to be rebuilt into new knowledge. No space wasted that way, it's efficient. Orderly.'

Sherlock had _lied _to him. John stared hard at the man before him, not because he felt betrayed by the lie, or because it had hurt him to hear it, but because Sherlock sounded suspiciously like he was grasping for denial. That lie had not been for John's benefit. And John rolled his sore shoulder tentatively to work out some of that rainy ache as he rolled the thoughts over in his head. Something bad enough then, a memory bad enough to have been deleted. Something bad enough that he was already reaching for ways to destroy it. John knew that Sherlock was aware of memory construction enough to know that once something had resurfaced in the form of a nightmare or flashback, it didn't want to go away again in a hurry.

'What if,' and John paused, collected his thoughts, stopped himself from applying caution in case he didn't say anything at all, 'what if it's all still there? Just...locked deep? You know how powerful cellular memory is. What if-'

'What if, what if, what if.' Sherlock spat with disgust. 'Give me something _concrete, _or nothing at all, John. I'm not here to entertain your nocturnal speculations.'

'Sherlock, are you hearing me?' John said, his voice gentling even more, in contrast to Sherlock's fierce, brittle anger.

But John knew that nothing would reach Sherlock this evening, and he reacted to the gentleness as though it were a storm of needles. Stung, he shot upright and picked up the bow and violin. And John winced as the first harsh tones of one of Sherlock's own 'piss off' compositions screeched into the room. He held up his hands, shook his head. 'I get it, I get it,' he thought, as he beat a hasty retreat and closed his own bedroom door behind him.

Sherlock didn't stop for hours, playing the discordant, jarred screeches that only barely threaded together into a disharmonious pattern. John put in earplugs, and mentally willed himself to reach for sleep. It wasn't too hard. The war had given him a lot of practice, and really, an angry violin was nothing compared to some of the things he'd fallen asleep to.

Days passed and three things happened.

The first was that Sherlock refused to talk about his nightmares or sleeping habits during the day. Not that he was ever particularly prone to such discussions, finding them a waste of time. Despite this, he developed depressed circles under his eyes, and when he thought John wasn't looking, his face had a haggard, haunted quality. John's chest ached during those times when his peripheral vision showed him a Sherlock he wasn't accustomed to seeing.

The second was that Sherlock kept having nightmares. Most were quiet, but John rarely missed them, since Sherlock took most of his rest in the form of afternoon naps or morning sleeps, the night-time more frequently being utilised for experiments, night walks, philosophising, notation and catching up on reading.

John learned that he could wake Sherlock up from a nightmare by repeatedly calling his name, but it took a long time, and the method seemed to temporarily distress Sherlock even further. He didn't understand why being woken up in such a way was so disturbing, but it disoriented Sherlock, and he descended rapidly into mute gloom immediately afterwards. So he also learned he could wake Sherlock up by gently prodding him with something nearby; which had been everything from a book, to a fork, even a broom handle. When Sherlock had seen the broom handle, he'd glared up at John with such indignance that he'd had to smile. Sherlock had turned his back on John and muttered something about uncouth flatmates and how would he like it if he were to stab John with a broom until he woke up.

Sherlock always woke up from his nightmares frightened, but that fear very quickly transformed into volatility. Grumpiness, anger, callousness and agitation were what confronted John instead for the next few minutes or hours. John had a relatively high tolerance for the callous things that people could say. He knew from experience that not everyone who was frightened resorted to pleading or clichéd movie nonsense about how they were 'scared.' The most violent verbal hatred could spew out of the mouth of someone mortally injured, out of someone who thought they were going to die out in the field. He was used to people getting so _angry _at the whole world and directing it at the nearest person offering a hand. A doctor, for example. And it wasn't as though he could just walk away until a soldier decided to become more reasonable. Not if he wanted to save their life. And while Sherlock wasn't a man bleeding out by clumps of grass as a sandstorm approached, he was a desperate man and a frightened man.

The third thing that happened was that John started sleeping on the sofa during the night. Sherlock seemed a bit perplexed at this, but John had checked it was okay first.

'It won't disturb you?' John asked.

'You're the one who will have to put up with my tromping around, as you call it. Playing the violin. And you're the one who-' A slight pause. 'Really? Keeping an eye on me at night? If I wanted a housekeeper slash nursemaid I'd,' another pause, 'oh wait, I've got one already. She's not worried, so I don't see why you should be.'

'Look, you can either tell me to shove it and I'll _consider _sleeping in my own room at night. Or you can just deal with the fact that _you _chose to live with a doctor, even though you probably deduced very early on that I might have – oh, I don't know – some strange compulsion to help people in pain, no matter how much they hold onto denial. War doctors especially, you know? We're very used to having to help people who don't want a bar of us. One of the common side effects of having to deal with breaks and internal injuries out there,' John waved a hand behind him, to indicate Aghanistan.

'So you're sleeping in here at night-time is _helping, _is it? What's next? You simply being in the same flat as me will become the equivalent of taking a dip in the medicinal spas of ye olde Aquae Sulis?'

John simply stood there, staunch, and waited to see what Sherlock would throw at him next.

They squared off, glared at each other, and then Sherlock's shoulders drooped uncharacteristically and he lowered his head.

'Fine.' He muttered.

'Good.' John said.

And that was the end of that altercation, and the beginning of John realising how awful that sofa was to sleep on, especially when Sherlock was using the masonry drill on different qualities of brick at three in the morning.

Still, it was not the nights that created the most worry. It was the following Monday when a really bad one happened again. Sherlock had spent the weekend on a case that he had thought held promise, and then in a flash of insight, proceeded to tie all the motives and evidence together neatly in a desultory manner that left even the usually tolerant Lestrade bristling as his intelligence was insulted over and over again.

After a weekend of no sleep, Sherlock had turned a black mood into an afternoon nap, and John had used the opportunity to lazily neaten the lounge. Mostly, this just involved using creative tetris to create slightly broader walkways through boxes and the leftover detritus of experiments. Sherlock deigned to allow him to do this, provided he threw _nothing _out. He'd tested that early on, tested the imperious, 'if you get rid of anything, I'll know,' thinking that Sherlock might be good, but he wasn't that good. And then had found himself entangled in a row that evening when Sherlock had stomped around the lounge claiming that the order was ruined because some receipts were missing. So now he just shifted and straightened and didn't put anything in a bin unless he'd checked it with Sherlock first.

John was in the process of shifting a stack of books when a thin moan made him stand upright and direct his attention to the hunched man on the sofa.

'_John.' _Sherlock said, high and faint. The tone, the name made the hairs stand up on the back of his arms. 'John, John.'

In two steps he was kneeling by Sherlock's side, forgetting about his rule to never wake Sherlock with his own hands lest he find his wrist broken, or wrenched, or patterned with bruises the shapes of fingers.

A pause, a sigh, as though the nightmare was settling, and John sighed with him. And then Sherlock tensed all over, became stiff as a board, and a temblor of shaking overcame him.

'_No.' _His voice shuddering out in a sick horror that left John queasy.

'Sherlock, Sherlock, wake up. Come on, wake up.' His hands on the man's shoulder, but no reaction. No jolting awake. No startling. Nothing. John shook slightly. 'Sherlock.'

'John...it...this is not..._no.' _

'Come on, you dozy bastard,' more vigorous shaking now. 'Sherlock!'

But nothing worked. Not the shaking, not the shouting. John stood and was just about to turn and get a glass of cold water to dump on the man, when Sherlock gagged himself awake on choked denials and half-spoken words that never made their way into coherency.

He pushed John out of the way without looking at him, and flung himself into the bathroom. John closed his eyes, pained, when he heard the heaving, the loss of the little food that Sherlock had consumed in three days. _What is this? What is going on? _He thought, though he had a horrible suspicion that he hoped was wrong. He walked into the bathroom and Sherlock had already flushed, was in the process of splashing water on his face. John watched as he visibly collected himself. He gave him time, wondered if it hindered rather than helped that he was there. Wondered if Sherlock was bothered that the object of his most current nightmare was so close.

'What did I do?' He asked. 'Or was I in danger?'

'You-' Sherlock began, and then grasped the basin with both hands and stared down into the sink like all the answers were there.

'I?'

'You...' Sherlock took a deep, shaking breath. 'This is unacceptable.' He pushed a thumb and forefinger into the space behind his eyes so hard that it had to hurt, and John took the hand away, looking at the white indentations left behind on already pale skin. Even in that quick motion, he could feel corded ligaments, the faint remaining trembles, clammy cold sweat on the inside of the wrist.

'Tell me.' John said, and Sherlock's eyes found him in the mirror.

'Look at me, John. I'm falling apart over the ramblings of my unconscious mind during REM state. Reduced to this. Doesn't it make you want to...' but clearly whatever it made him want to do was too hateful to say aloud. Sherlock scowled at himself, and then pressed his fingers into hollows behind his eyes again. Hard. John made a noise in his throat and took the wrist in his hand to move it, only to have it twitched off impatiently. The fingers immediately pressed into his eyes again, and John left it alone, watched in sympathy as he realised the pain Sherlock was causing was probably a welcome distraction to whatever ghosts and conjurations lurked in his mind.

'What did I do?'

'It doesn't matter, John. It never happened. It was a lie. It was a trick M-, my mind was playing on me.'

'Or you could just tell me what I did.' John said, with a twist of his lips. He sat down on the edge of the bath and marvelled at how tidy it was in here. For all of the clutter and mess out there, in here it stayed clean. Sherlock enjoyed thinking while submerged in the hot water of a bath, enjoyed watching curlicues of steam and musing on physics while composing new hypotheses for new experiments. The bathroom was something of a sanctuary.

'It seems that my memories were not deleted as thoroughly as I first thought. It is not, on the one hand, as though arbitrary information is filtering back in. I am not – _thankfully – _remembering primary school astronomy or anything so dreary. I still can't recall Anderson's first name, though I'm sure it is something daft. But there are other events and occasions that I knew were gone. Unreachable. Destroyed. I'm not equipped to...'

'Well, why would you be? Your system has been so efficient in the past, hasn't it? You'd have no reason to learn. Look,' John said, slipping into medical mode too easily as he watched Sherlock bent over the basin, staring down the drain, 'let's go back out there and just sit down and talk about it.'

'Not yet.' Sherlock said. He lifted his arms from the basin and then folded down into one ungainly heap of long legs and arms on the bathroom floor, back pressed against the wall, head uncomfortably close to the sink.

The sigh that rattled out of Sherlock's throat was exhausted, and John wanted to pick him up, take him to bed, assure him that there would be no more nightmares and that four hours of sleep would leave him feeling refreshed and bright and sharp as it always used to. But he could not promise that at all, so instead he sat as his hips became increasingly uncomfortable on the bath rim, and waited.

'I'm aware, for all I rely on my hard-drive, my mind palace,' an uncomfortable pause there, 'that my memories are still, by and large, ruled by the amygdala and the hippocampus. And I know from research, a lot of research, _recent _research, that suppressed memories don't fall so easily again into suppression once they've resurfaced. I honestly thought I had deleted them all. I tested the theory so long ago. Based on the idea that brain trauma could cause amnesia, retrograde amnesia, some of it permanent. Clearly it _was _possible to erase and delete.'

'Please don't tell me you experimented with _brain trauma.' _John said, hoarse.

'Don't be daft. This,' Sherlock said, waving a hand around his head, 'is clearly the money-maker.' His lips quirked up at his own joke. 'But I did experiment, and I developed techniques that were wonderful, refocused me. I had to be careful not to delete too much, of course. The temptation was there. But that is neither here nor there.'

John listened, this was perhaps the most that Sherlock had said to him in an even tone of voice since the nightmares began. He wondered if the man was just so exhausted, he couldn't even be bothered with his indignant fury anymore.

'You are right. I am not equipped to deal with these memories. But that is not the problem. _Problems.' _Sherlock said, pressing his fingers into his eyes again.

'So what is?' John asked, following the lead that Sherlock had handed to him.

'You're aware of how people with PTSD begin recalling memories yes? I'm not saying I have anything so urbane, just let's follow the research a little ways. You'd know about it, you'll have followed the literature. In the event of a single memory, it is – at first – less traumatising aspects of the memory that come back first, as though the brain knows that the conscious mind can only handle so much. A scent. A feeling. A texture. Singular. The mind goes _easy. _But with time, layers are peeled back and you develop a tolerance for the singular, and so the brain feeds you more and more until finally the memory is all there, full frontal, you could say. And you must be aware that if someone is recalling multiple traumatic memories, that the brain tends to start with the least horrific first? Not always, of course, maybe not even often, but enough that it has been documented in the literature; especially that which deals with abnormal memory formation.'

_Ah, _thought John, _shit. _

'There's worse to come, you mean.'

'I don't remember,' Sherlock snapped, and then raised a hand in an eloquent, 'but possibly,' gesture.

'I'm not going anywhere.' John said, and Sherlock opened tired eyes and gave him an unfathomable look. John wondered if, in that moment, Sherlock was recalling the John from his dreams. He couldn't put his finger on it, but he suspected that he had not been in danger. He suspected he had been the enemy, and the gaze Sherlock now pinned him with didn't allay his fears at all.


	3. Chapter 3

Warnings for this chapter: Bullying. Aaaaaaangst.

Author's Note: For those curious, the nursery rhyme 'Who Did Kill Cock Robin,' is an old, mostly forgotten nursery rhyme that is – like all the best ones – delightfully sinister and mostly about murder. As always, reviews make me write more, and I am not above turning kittenish eyes a hopeful pout at you.

* * *

**03**

Despite Sherlock's sinister proclamation that things were going to get worse, there was a lull in the severity of the nightmares for a while. John hovered, and Sherlock had all sorts of cutting remarks ready on the tip of his tongue every time he found an unexpected person in his space, but he held them there like wormwood, because as loathe as he was to admit it, he appreciated the hovering.

There were two days where Sherlock avoided all sleep, though not because he was so crass as to be frightened of slumber, but because he was hellishly sorting through pop culture manuscripts and transcripts for clues to a killer's next move. It was immensely frustrating. Sherlock had never had much time for pop culture, and John's vast and comprehensive knowledge of daytime television wasn't assisting because this was all about comic book adaptations and action movies and if he had to read another script with paltry dialogue and plots you could figure out in two seconds he was going to call Mycroft – yes, Mycroft – and have him shut down Hollywood.

It could be done. It _should _be done. In the end, John had folded his arms and planted his feet and said:

'If you get Mycroft to shut down Hollywood, I'll never make you tea again. I'll play, oh god, I don't know, _The Fantastic Four _every time you're on a case. Some of us _like _mindless entertainment, Sherlock.'

'Emphasis on the mindless.' Sherlock muttered.

'Emphasis on the entertainment.'

'Learn a musical instrument or a language. No wonder all your brains are so underdeveloped and useless. How nice it must be, to have the brain capacity to find all that dreck remotely entertaining.'

'You know perfectly well that I've learned a musical instrument _and _a language, and that it's still possible to enjoy pop culture.'

Sherlock gave him a look that withered and stormed out of the room. John would probably count it as a win because he got the last word, but Sherlock knew better.

None-the-less, he solved the case and texted Lestrade and his brain – wanting to purge, no doubt – told his body to shut down a few minutes later, and he slept, limbs akimbo half on his chair and half off it.

At first there was the terrible apprehension of what might be waiting for him. After all, that last dream, the last one, that had been an unpredictable wedge into his equilibrium. He'd expected only memories. And certainly the memories were unpleasant, especially when his internal Moriarty threw him viscerally into his younger experiences, where his detachment was undeveloped and everything was too, too real. But ultimately, all memories were fictive, because they were not happening in the present. Cognitively, this was what he'd concluded about the matter, and it had allowed him to gather the impatience to call Moriarty out, tell him that repeated memories of his father's violence was tedious. 'You can do better,' he'd said.

It turned out he could. Internal Moriarty could _lie _to him.

That horrible dream, the last one. A replay of a place he'd been before. Sherlock so triumphant in the pool, holding up the USB, having stupidly, stupidly underestimated his opponent. He'd been announcing the metaphorical check at the end of a match and then John had walked out. _Checkmate. _And those seconds where he didn't _know, _and he felt so _stupid _to have allowed an opponent to live with him, how could have underestimated John like _this? _And seconds of self-recrimination that he'd wanted a colleague, even a – dare he say it? – friend, so badly he'd overlook something so terrible. Something like John-as-Moriarty. And in that dream, the situation had played out in an entirely different way.

John as the villain, smirking and cold. John had _laughed _at him.

'You're so stupid.' John said, in that even voice that once had soothed the fears of so many, and now lit a bomb inside of Sherlock's chest. In the dream, his mind had whisked through thousands of moments with John. _How did he not know? Where were the clues? _All of John's solicitousness now seemed fake, all those cups of tea he'd made, and had he been thinking that Sherlock was an idiot the entire time? Had John laughed in his free moments, replaying Sherlock's deductions while knowing him for the utter, dense, desperate fool that he was?

There had been utter, unshakeable faith in his own ability to deduce, and in the space of that dream, it had been blown to pieces. John wasn't the final pip, no, _Sherlock was. _And he'd been the slowest on the uptake. It was unbearable. It made the whole world, his entire perception of it, utterly unreal. If he couldn't deduce, if he didn't have his _mind, _then what was he? The uselessness of human flesh. He was transportfor a brain he couldn't trust. And while John taunted Sherlock with contempt and disdain, Sherlock had tried to wake himself up. Tried and failed, and each subsequent failure brought with it a building queasiness, an internal horror. John's voice surrounded him, and he couldn't get away from it.

He'd woken up, John over him, and the whole awful scene pressed into him until he found himself throwing up. It was a miracle he'd made it to the bathroom.

He knew John was only trying to help, and he mentally gave his brain the finger by attempting to open up to the man. But all the same, there was a lurking suspicion now. A paranoia. He watched John more closely, he wished there were an easy way to prove himself wrong. John was safe. John was..._John. _Those things were not as true as they had been a few days ago. After all, it made more sense to him that John would display that almost superhuman tolerance of the issues that made other people turn away if he had an end-game, and that end-game involved destroying Sherlock.

But despite that, the conversation with John had still somehow helped. When he saw Moriarty in his mind palace the next time, scratching graffiti into a desk, he was annoyed, but not terrified.

'Don't you think this unconscious self-sabotage is getting a bit tired now?' He said. 'Clearly we'd do better if we matched our wits, rather than working against each other.'

'Dear me, Sherlock, all this time and you think I've been working against you?' Moriarty said, stabbing his knife into the bench with an air of finality. 'This is your palace, not mine. This is what's been lurking here all along. I'm just here for the ride. I do like a good _ride.' _Lewd now, and Sherlock flicked his eyes skywards because he doesn't even think he has the patience for this sort of banter anymore. Give him the real Moriarty, not some manufactured facsimile.

'If you need me, I'll be in the East Wing. Do try not to blow anything up while I'm in there, although,' he paused, 'if you see a box of cinema transcripts down by the back porch, you are welcome to set fire to them.'

He turned and walked out of the room, and allowed himself a small, smug smirk at the look of shock on Moriarty's face. Now that things were on a more even keel, he felt an increasing sense of confidence in himself once more. He wasn't ready to go to the area that Moriarty had obliterated just yet, didn't feel like poring through damage and reconstructing the rooms. He couldn't entirely shake the feeling that Moriarty was in the background somewhere, mischievous and damaging, but he could still work; and so he worked.

It soothed him.

* * *

Things continued much in that vein for the next two weeks. Sherlock didn't have a regular Circadian rhythm; he knew enough about sleep disorders to know that it wasn't worth diagnosing, because they were messy, unpredictable matters that refused to be pigeonholed. Besides, he could work around it. Most criminals worked at night anyway, and his habit of going two to three days without sleep seemed to benefit cases. Even if a criminal started out a few steps ahead, most of them had predictable Circadian cycles, and in difficult cases it was easy to catch up on them while they were stupidly sleeping through their own machinations.

When he did sleep, internal Moriarty was either absent, or unable to adequately keep up with him, which was disappointing and a relief all at once. There were no more unexpected memories, and Sherlock wondered at that, since he knew he'd deleted a lot more of his youth than just a few altercations with his father. He decided it was entirely possible that he'd just not deleted _those _memories adequately, and everything else was likely gone.

John still slept on the sofa, and he was attentive. But he could also tell John was trying not to be overbearing or smothering. There weren't incessant barrages of questions about whether he was okay and was he tired and should he take a nap now and did he need someone in the same room with him. Instead, John was simply around more often, and he flicked a few more furtive looks in Sherlock's direction.

At least, Sherlock thought that was the case, because it was difficult to know where his paranoia ended and John's increased surveillance began. He had no patience for paranoia, but it still lurked, like the unwelcome smell of burnt carbon, one of the few things he couldn't abide. It drifted past him and he'd reflect on the dream, and with a dogged exasperation he'd remind himself that it was a _dream _and that John actually had been kidnapped by Moriarty and made very vulnerable and that John hadn't orchestrated any of it. John could have _died. _

That never made him feel better, but it did make him feel a little less paranoid.

* * *

'Are you refreshed? Did you get it all out of your system?'

Moriarty was excited, Sherlock held back a groan. He had surfaced in his mind palace, out in the gardens by the neatly maintained shale pathway etched in fossils that Sherlock knew off by heart. Moriarty faced the other way, he was bent over a rose bush that Sherlock had planted to remind him of Mummy, a place to go to in his head as he couldn't – and often wasn't inclined to – visit her nearly enough out there in the real world. The roses were perfect. Elegant. Classic. Cliched. Packed a hell of a sting.

Sherlock noticed other things. The hands in Moriarty's pockets, clearly hiding something. A vague smell of construction work, brick dust yes, and maybe the wet creaminess of concrete. Moriarty's boots had scuffs on them, and the man would never be content to wear scuffed boots without changing, so the marks must have happened very recently. Another memory then. A construction site perhaps. Moriarty tampering with his mind palace.

'You're not going to play?' Moriarty said, turning and pouting. 'It's been so much fun, watching you attempt to burn away all that pesky paranoia. And it _is _pesky, isn't it? Though how you could ever see that boring doctor as anything more than a _boring doctor _is beyond me.'

'I really have no notion of what you're talking about,' Sherlock said, because he was tired of this topic.

Moriarty paused, grinned and then drew himself up to his full height, threw his shoulders back, straightened his neck and mimicked in perfect melodrama:

'I really have no notion of what you're talking about.' He laughed, high and brief and then his face fell into utter seriousness. 'Really? That's your riposte? Do _try _and be a bit more fun, Sherly.'

Sherlock grit his teeth together. He had always _hated _that nickname, and he could never adequately delete it, because more than one person had come up with it, each thinking they were terribly original every time. He was given a particular name at birth, and he was attached to that particular name, and all attempts at nicknames were too 'buddy buddy,' especially as most of the people who called him Sherly were not remotely interested in being anything close to friends anyway.

The day Donovan had called him that with a look of glee on her face, he'd casually deconstructed her pathetic need for authoritarian father figures. He'd explained it was all obviously about having a callous and possibly even abusive father and desperately looking to take control of a situation which could never be controlled, and had then _obviously _culminated in a pathetic crush on a Detective Inspector who was not remotely interested. And he'd gone on to the point where she'd walked out in tears, and Lestrade had walked in saying, 'Sherlock, you can't go around making my officers cry! It's unprofessional!'

Moriarty cleared his throat expectantly and then turned around and walked away from Sherlock.

'And so we all play follow the leader,' Moriarty called out behind him. Sherlock very nearly ignored him. He very nearly walked in a completely different direction. But all his observations lead to the conclusion that whether or not he paid any attention to the man, this manifestation of Moriarty could still do damage to his mind palace. His tactic of ignorance was only going to work for so long. Perhaps confrontation would be better. Perhaps it would just be better to _know _what he was going to have to fix and repair by finding out directly.

So he followed a few paces behind, a frown on his face.

Moriarty hummed nursery rhymes under his breath. Sherlock caught the refrain of a lively 'Four and twenty blackbirds,' and a more sombre 'London Bridge is falling down,' rendered in a low, funereal dirge. And then, as they rounded the West facing of the external palace, he began jauntily singing 'To market, to market' with more and more volume. During this, he would turn around and raise his eyebrows at Sherlock as though inviting him to sing along.

Sherlock saw what was wrong with his mind palace and stopped abruptly. Moriarty kept on going like he hadn't noticed, but then he also stopped with a graceful bow. He faced the damage with a look of satisfaction on his face.

'What is it?' Sherlock said, staring at the gaping black hole tunnelling down beneath the foundations, all blackness and charcoal stairs that disappeared into the inky abyss.

'I made it for you,' Moriarty said, 'it's a _present.' _

The present filled Sherlock with a nameless, unspeakable horror. He shivered and looked elsewhere. Everything else appeared normal. The different subspecies of poplars lining the pathway of seashells from local shorelines. The stones of the palace itself (for this side was made of stone). Everything seemed correct, and yet here was some awful hole blasted right into the middle of it all.

And he wasn't completely clueless about psychology, even though it wasn't his forte and he preferred to observe concrete facts like those that could be deduced through chemistry experiments. He'd read enough Freud and Jung to know that descending into a tunnel in a dream-state represented a whole bevy of things from a regression into the womb, all the way through to all that dire 'when you look into the abyss, it looks back into you.'

Sherlock wanted it _gone. _

'Speechless?' Moriarty chuckled. 'Thought you would be. I was hoping to make a _big_ impression. This isn't even the best part! Oh, you have to come see. Do come and have a gander at what's inside.'

Moriarty lead and Sherlock followed. He stopped at the threshold and was aware of something discordant as Moriarty's back disappeared into the gloom. It was a rhythmic dissonance, and Sherlock realised it was his heart beating loud enough that he could feel it. All at once it hit him that this damage, all of it, had happened in a matter of _weeks. _It had taken him _years _to build up his mind palace. To redo rooms, to rebuild, to add extensions. How could so much damage have been done in _weeks? _

He took a deep breath and descended the large steps. They were a little too steep to be comfortable, and were porous under his feet, releasing a smell of charred wood. The darkness pressed in around him like something living. He'd never liked the feeling of being totally surrounded by something, being oppressed by it, and while he had no problems with the dark overall, this was different. This was something that lived and breathed. It was something that internal Moriarty had created, and he knew – and hated knowing – that he was out of his depth even as he descended deeper.

Candlelight appeared first, in the distance. It was cheerful and orange, and it gave Moriarty a devilish halo that reddened his suit and limned his hair with crimson.

Sherlock's heart beat harder, and ground his teeth together so hard his jaw hurt. _Master yourself and deal with this, you wanted confrontation, after all. _

They ended up in a wide cavern, lit with improbable candle chandeliers. Mahogany shelving, wall to wall, floor to ceiling, had been installed everywhere. It looked – all being equal – like an unusually welcoming place, considering it was underground, and there was so much fathomless black between the glowing lights.

On every shelf, a container of some kind, a memento, an heirloom. All of them prickled at Sherlock, tugged the hair on his arms into an upright position. They were all somehow familiar. They were all...

_Memories? _

Sherlock stumbled backwards and Moriarty clapped his hands together. It resounded loudly, echoed for far longer than it should have.

'I like this. You're so _quick. _I love the way you figure these things out so fast. It's so sexy, that I don't even have to tell you. Though I think, dear Sherlock, I think I have to tell you anyway. Because I'm so _proud _of myself. Look at all of them. I don't even think I've got everything yet. I was very busy. This took me a long time, you have to appreciate that. Appreciate the work that's gone into this, would you? All of these memories, it's amazing you remember any of your childhood at all. But,' Moriarty allowed a dramatic pause, 'you don't really, do you?'

He sauntered up to Sherlock and rested a comradely hand on his shoulder, and Sherlock jerked away, his eyes blazed.

'But then,' Moriarty continued, face cast into flickering shadow in the candlelight, 'but then you don't remember a great deal about your adolescence, your early adulthood, university, I've been through _all _of these, you see. All of them. I know them inside and out. Do you want to see one? I have a few favourites.'

Sherlock's mouth was dry.

_Where the bloody hell was John? _

'Nothing was deleted.' Sherlock said, flat and certain. Nothing at all. He wanted a target for this travesty, but the only one that came to mind was himself. His mind was betraying him. Turning against him. It felt like the burning, blasting whir of a drill on a high setting under his skin, moving through his cervical spine all the way up into his skull. It occurred to him that he might be developing a migraine. It had been some time since he'd had one of those.

'Sherlock, my dear, are you frightened? And here I thought you liked the thrill of the chase. The Game. The Work. We've got our bishops and rooks out on the board now, don't we? It's not just a dance of pawns is it? Although chess is so _obvious_, isn't it? I always preferred mancala anyway, especially when I get to make the first move.'

Moriarty lunged forwards suddenly and grabbed Sherlock by the hair and the arm. He propelled Sherlock towards the shelving and jumped out of the way as Sherlock's brain finally engaged and he lashed out violently. He hated it when people touched him unexpectedly, but it was a whole other layer of unpleasant when it was Moriarty, and it was _here. _His scalp still stung. And by the time Sherlock had whirled on Moriarty, in a matter of seconds, ready to take him down, Moriarty had opened a music box and the slow, gentle strain of a largely forgotten nursery rhyme began. Who did kill Cock Robin?

Sherlock's arm sped out to snap the lid shut, but Moriarty jumped backwards and tutted at him.

'Now, now, now, just let it _come _to you, will you? You're so impatient!'

* * *

He was sitting cross-legged under an old oak tree at the large park several streets away from his house. He needed a break. It was Summer, the sky was an unfair shade of blue and the sun burnt it's white noon light into the corneas of anyone who dared to look sideways at it. But Sherlock was not looking up at the sky, he was staring instead at the carapace of a dead chafer beetle.

He was nine.

He liked the park, because it gave him a place to observe life as it unfolded. It was never the same. And while his chemistry set was appealing, Mummy had gotten mad at him when he'd commandeered the kitchen table and etched stains into the wood, and sent him outside to 'play,' but what she really meant was 'your father is going to be more than cross if he sees this mess, so go away while I clean it up.' She meant well, though at the time he had yelled at her for ruining it, ruining everything, ruining all his experiments.

But he calmed away from everyone else, and now he was looking at the shiny back of the dead beetle and completely absorbed. He knew the beetle had come to a natural end; unusual, considering how many hungry animals could spot the glinting backs from a distance, how many would have appreciated this tasty morsel. It was the right time to see a carapace like this; it would have just laid its eggs in the soil, and the larvae would just be hatching, probably right beneath him. He liked to imagine them chewing on the roots of the grass underneath where he lay, and here above, the sacrifice.

He lost track of time, watching and observing. Hours could pass. Sometimes Mycroft had been sent to fetch him home, but just as often it was the maid, or the awful nanny, who reminded him at every available moment – out of earshot of his Mummy and brother – that he was a hateful child, 'put together wrong in all ways, I swear.'

But just as often he was left to absorb himself. A Sherlock whiling away the time lost in his thoughts was a quiet Sherlock, and a quiet Sherlock was not ranting at parents or other family members or strangers or the violin teacher or his own experiments.

A mesmerised Sherlock didn't see the world go past, beyond what his eyes had fallen on. His senses narrowed and he became pure focus. His mind became blank and empty, except for words and numbers and flashes of insight, disconnected from everything, so pleasing to let rise up at will; they felt like the burst of liquid sugar on his tongue, coloured his mind in brilliant spectrums of light. So he didn't hear the group of footsteps approach him. He didn't hear the laughter or the taunts. He didn't know that four hours had passed, which was a shame, because he usually tried to clear out of the park before Mac's boys – as they styled themselves – liked to come by for their late afternoons of graffiti and general hooliganism.

He was jerked back to the present brutally, his concentration pierced as his head was pulled back and both his arms were grabbed at the same time, by two different kids. Dizzy and trying to orient, he started to struggle as a cacophony of laughter surrounded him. He hated being touched, and all the contact was too much, too much, _too much_ his brain shouted at him.

'Hi, Cock Robin!' One shouted, and the rest cackled and followed suit. The breath exploded out of him as he was kicked sharply in the gut, and then a crack of pain as another kick followed. He blinked, opened his mouth to protest, he didn't understand. He hadn't done anything _wrong _today. He was just _sitting _there. It had never gotten bad this quickly. He didn't understand how he could look at a beetle and know in a matter of moments how it had ended up dead on the grass, but how he could have experienced the loathsome nature of these kids many times before and _still _not understand how to avoid them.

The pain in his ribs persisted, blossomed, and he realised at least one was fractured.

'Who killed Cock Robin?' One shrieked.

'I did! The Sparrow!' The one called Davey shouted, and Sherlock swallowed.

He hated this bloody nursery rhyme. He hated the nickname Cock Robin. He hated all nicknames, since they all brought an inevitable cruelty with them. He knew, when the teacher had sung Who did kill Cock Robin? to them in class, and Mac had turned to him and said 'Sher_cock_ Robin,' on a malevolent whisper, he knew he was stuck with it. It didn't help that the whole damn nursery rhyme was about murder. It didn't help that none of the other kids thought that his thoughts about death were normal.

'So that's it then?' He managed, around the pain of his ribs, his sternum, his arms being pulled behind his back and his wrenched shoulders. 'Put me down! You've had your fun!'

They responded to that by wrestling him down to the ground, and anger made his eyes sharper, he raked Mac with his gaze and sneered.

'Oh,' he coughed and then choked on the feeling of a cracked bone shifting above his lung and started again, '_oh, _I get it. Dad's been drinking again, Mac? Back off the wagon is he? Don't give me that look; that clothing doesn't fit you anymore. You only ever wear it when your Mum hasn't done the washing, and she's such a clean freak that she only ever stops when depression takes hold, and _that _only ever happens when your Dad starts drinking again. And you resorting to the lowest form of communication to get your point across. _Violence._ Ever think your Dad takes one look at your face and thinks 'God, I need a whisky?'

He knew it was the wrong thing to say. He knew it would aggravate the kid. But he knew it would cut to the quick and if he couldn't break bones right now, he'd settle for shattering composure.

Mac stalked up to him, pushed his face right up close, there was a smell of buttered toast on his breath and something else. Something old and stale and..._whisky. _

'Tried some to see what it was like, did you?' Sherlock said.

'I'm going to kill you, Cock Robin. And you know who'll care? No one. No one cares about you. Your nanny told Mrs. Donaldson that you were horrid. Beyond horrid. She's thinking of quitting, because of _you. _No one would care if I killed you, right now.'

And then out of nowhere, Sherlock felt unspeakably tired. Waves of pain were radiating out from his left-hand side, and he sagged against the arms holding him. The kids behind him stumbled a bit, forced to take his dead weight. He hated that he suddenly wanted to cry, because he would not appear weak in front of these moronic kids. He _would not. _

'Nothing to say?' Mac said, his breath vile and too close. It stuck to his face, and Sherlock twitched trying to get rid of it.

'You know it's true, don't you?' Mac whispered, like it was just the two of them at the park, not ten kids. 'You know no one would care. You're just a freak of nature, _Cock Robin.' _

'How?' Sherlock said, voice thin. 'How would you kill me?'

'What?'

'How?'

'Why?' Mac sounded confused. 'I don't know. Bash in your head. Strangle you. Push you in front of a cab. Not today though. I mean, maybe you're right. Maybe I do want something to kick around after Dad's had a few. You're easy. You're just too easy.'

And Sherlock tried to line up retorts but he had nothing. He knew his strangeness made him an easy target. He tried to hide and avoid them, but still they found him, and today in broad daylight no less. And he knew – even though he was so cross at them for what they had done – the nanny would blame him, even Mycroft would shake his head, 'I don't know why you go to that park, Sherlock. Don't you know better by now?'

He clutched at his left side when they dropped him, the pain was like a giant spider attacking his side and he wondered how he'd get home. How he'd explain it. It was a lot of walking to do with a broken bone.

He'd squeezed his eyes shut against the pain, the tiredness, he'd thought they were done.

He was wrong.

Something hot splashed on his face, his clothing, and his olfactory senses knew what it was even has he tried to roll away from it, humiliated and spasming on a suppressed sob. Mac was _pissing _on him. Sherlock tried to imagine how this could be happening. It was broad daylight. It was a park. Anyone could see. The oak tree was in a sheltered position, but it wasn't _that _hidden.

And then just like that, they were gone.

'See ya, Cock Robin.' Mac called behind him, like they were good friends. His voice all friendly and cheerful. He heard them all laughing to each other as they left.

He lay there, trying to make himself get up, trying to make himself not cry, trying to make the pain go away, but all he seemed to be able to do was stay curled and fetal on the warm grass.

He pretended he was a dead chafer beetle. And he was shaking like a leaf when Mycroft was finally fetched to bring him back.

It was the third time he got to be in a hospital since being born.

* * *

Moriarty snapped the music box shut with a triumphant grin and Sherlock had grabbed it and flung it hard onto the floor before the man could prevent it. But the music box didn't break, it bounced and then rolled a little ways, and then stopped. Sherlock glared at it like it was poison. His head throbbed and pulsed, and he could see bursts of colour and light in the corner of his eyes.

'I'm leaving.' He said, thickly, his mouth taking some time to work properly.

He turned and tried to walk calmly up the steps, but he ended up bolting when he thought Moriarty couldn't see him anymore. The running jostled his head even more, and he was glad there weren't that many steps to climb. But once he'd reached the twentieth and there was no light, no external palace, no familiar territory, just _darkness, _he stopped. He reached out into the black and felt a solid wall in front of him. His fingers crawled along it, searching for cracks or crevices, _anything, _but there was nothing there.

'Oh, did I forget to tell you?' Moriarty sang from beneath him, unfairly gleeful. Sherlock rested his head against the cool wall and shuddered.

_He was trapped. _


	4. Chapter 4

**Author's note - **Reviews are love. :)

* * *

**04**

'Rachmaninoff's Concerto Number 3! Doesn't this remind you of that? And where are we, do you think? Page five? Page four? Three minutes in? Intermezzo, even? That part was dull, wasn't it? Let's pretend there's only two parts. You know, I've always preferred piano to violin. All those whiny strings just sound like a little kid whining about his Daddy issues. Oh, my Daddy never _loved _me. Oh, my Daddy hit me with a riding crop.' Moriarty's voice sailed up the claustrophobic staircase, and each word was a tiny steel rivet drumming into Sherlock's skull. Definitely a migraine. He felt physically weak, he struggled to remember that it was all just a dream. He could hear himself breathing and he couldn't seem to make that stop.

He could hear the footsteps now, coming closer. Scuffed-but-new boots grinding into the burnt wooden steps.

Sherlock loathed migraines. They were one of the few physical ailments that drove multiple wedges into his ability to think. Oh, certainly, there were some moments of brilliance when the auras began, but when the pain started, it was a struggle to hold all those balls in the air, to stay balanced.

_Wake up, _he tried to command himself, but the words were only words now, not a resounding mental slap.

He swallowed nausea when he felt the small hand press its faux consolation into his right shoulder. The fingers squeezed as though in reassurance, and then Sherlock almost smiled when he felt the squeeze turn into a merciless grip. _There, _he thought, _that's more like it. _

'Such an ordinary child, ordinary bullying, ordinary reactions to it all. I expected better from you, Sherly. Cock Robin. Chéri.'

'You're not even real.' Sherlock said, in lieu of all the questions he wanted to ask about why and how.

'No. Try again.' Moriarty said, the hand on his shoulder becoming two, pushing him into the wall. Sherlock's mind scrambled, not liking that he'd gotten something wrong. Vaguely he was aware of how preposterous it was to be doing this in his head, against a figment of his imagination. He stepped sideways to remove the touch from his shoulders, but all he succeeded doing was slumping against the wall as dizziness swamped him.

'You,' Sherlock said, closing his eyes and trying to find a sentence. 'You're not real.' He said again.

'I broke you,' Moriarty sighed, withdrawing his hands. 'Already?' A high whine in the back of his throat.

Sherlock made a noise of disagreement. The lights were too bright. Except his eyes were closed and he was in the darkness but he could feel it. He could feel the glare. He raised a hand to his eyelids and pressed hard, as though by pressure alone he could remove the pounding flashes.

'Don't ruin it, my dear. You won't stay? You won't play a little longer?'

He felt something wet and soft against the side of his face. Cool and gentle. Lips. Moriarty was kissing, no, _mouthing _him. Sherlock flung an arm out and Moriarty stumbled backwards, catching himself on the wall. Sherlock had his eyes open now, finding some last reserve of revulsion. He stood, awkward, breathing like he'd just run a marathon.

Moriarty grinned.

'We'll call that one a _prelude. _I always did prefer the Preludes to the Concertos anyway, you know, dear Sherlock. Not that it matters. We have plenty of both to keep you company here. Go then, go fan that _spark _of resistance. Come back with guns blazing and all those other trite and eensy weensy methods of resistance. Do you know what I like about these little _tête__-à-__tête_s of ours?' Moriarty crooned, and Sherlock closed his eyes against the throbbing lights again, nociception spinning out of control, sensory receptors stimulated all along his neck and the back of his skull.

He never did find out what Moriarty liked so much. He woke up.

* * *

'The _light.' _He groaned, arm coming up, a gag causing his throat to clench. There was a murmur, a sentence that was spoken out loud and therefore too painful to be heard clearly, and then the overhead light was turned off and the room was plunged into darkness. His nervous system perceived the whole process as taking an awfully long time, but he knew it must have only been a few seconds.

Information filtered in more slowly than what he was used to. There was the cold disk of a stethoscope pressed against his sternum. He could smell John's toothpaste. He was covered in sweat, though he did not think he was still sweating. He was cold despite blankets. He could feel the pressure of Moriarty's hands on his shoulders, that wet mouth over his jawline.

He expected John to talk, to ask questions, but John operated silently now. The stethoscope was removed, and Sherlock's face twitched when he felt the backs of fingers gently resting on his forehead. Not as clinical as a thermometer, but he was sure that if he had to open his mouth for anything right now, he'd throw up on it. The fingers stayed, but a moment later he felt the push of an infrared ear thermometer. He knew it was supposed to be non-invasive, he knew John was just making sure everything was okay, but the push upset his internal equilibrium and the whole world began to spin even though his eyes were closed. He couldn't swallow down the sick moan of protest in time.

'Sorry, sorry.' John said, but he didn't remove the thermometer until it beeped.

The fingers stayed on the back of Sherlock's head, and then the hand turned, and he felt the curve match his forehead, the warmth of fingerpads on his temple. In contrast to Moriarty's cloying presence, this felt allowable.

When John went to remove his fingers, Sherlock's head followed the motion. Not much, not more than half a centimetre. The fingers hesitated, and then returned to his forehead. Sherlock sighed and listened to the sound of his breathing, felt the pounding of his heart.

'Tachycardic?' He murmured, keeping his voice as even as possible.

'Hm, yes. Blood pressure elevated. That was a _hell _of a nightmare, Sherlock.' John said, and Sherlock swallowed.

'BPPV.' He said, because he knew John's medical knowledge would take care of the rest. There was a silence where he expected questions to clarify the acronym, but after about thirty seconds, John's fingers moved from Sherlock's forehead and rummaged around in his medical kit instead.

'I didn't know you got migraines,' John said, and Sherlock listened to the precise sounds of a syringe being removed from wrapping, a needle being affixed. Most doctors would want good light for that kind of work, but John had been in a warzone, and making up dosages in the dim light of evening would be nothing. For a moment, Sherlock allowed some gratitude at John's history, his experience, his medical kit.

'Sumatriptan?' Sherlock said, trying to give himself something to focus on. Something other than the sensation of John's fingers _not _being on his forehead, something other than Mac and his boys, laughing and holding him down, the sharp don't-breathe-don't-breathe pain of broken ribs.

'Have you had it before?'

'Just do it, already.' Sherlock said, and felt a wisp of amusement curl inside him when John chuckled.

The prick of the needle, the slide of metal, was nothing at all compared to his head, the nightmares, the mind palace, Moriarty, _all _of it.

'Why do you have it?' Sherlock asked, and ignored the way the last half of the sentence slurred. He hoped John would realise the whole question sounded more like, 'why do you have it? That's not a standard addition to a medical kit and I've never seen any signs of you having migraines in the past.'

'Harry. She used to get them all the time. Is this volume alright? I'm not talking too loud?'

'Everything is too loud. And too bright.'

'Do you want me to leave you alone?' John asked, and Sherlock heard the pause, as though he wasn't sure it was a good idea. Neither did Sherlock.

'Please stay. Isn't that appropriate for a doctor anyway? To monitor the sumatriptan? Make sure I don't have an ischaemic stroke or something?'

'Hush. Stop talking.' John said, and Sherlock could hear the smile in it.

Silence stretched out between them. John was kneeling by the side of his bed, elbows on the mattress, like a religious boy offering lazy prayers. Sherlock's family never forced him into religion, though he did choose to experience some of it, just to know, just to _see _if he was missing out on anything. He knew very quickly that he was not, though he did enjoy the pomp and ritual, and secretly wished people made room for elaborate stained glass windows in other areas of their lives.

All at once the content of the music box came back to him. The tune of Cock Robin, the laughter, the biting aroma of a boy's urine late in the afternoon. The horrible, cruel jerk of being pulled from his wonderful focus by _those _boys. Mummy banning him from visiting the park again, and the boys finding him anyway, at other moments. None of it deleted after all.

The quietness of the room turned into a sharp inhale, a hitched breath, and Sherlock damned his body for its expressions even as John raised up and leaned towards him in the darkness.

'Sherlock?' John said, concerned, and Sherlock squeezed his eyes shut.

'Would you,' he paused, wondered if he'd regret this in four or six or twenty four hours; however long it took for the worst of the migraine to fade. 'Would you...check my temperature again?'

A pause, and Sherlock damned himself and damned his lack of filters and buffers and damned that it was _John _and damned that he'd ever thought it was a good idea to share with a flatmate in the first place. In the space of the pause, it felt like John had whispered a thousand denials, or had misinterpreted, and he had almost fully prepared himself for the push of the tympanic thermometer.

He started when he felt fingers resting hesitantly on his forehead. Not the backs of John's fingers, but the fronts, curving carefully around the arch of his right temple.

'Like this?' John asked, and Sherlock knew that John was giving him an out. All it would take was for him to say, 'no, you twit, who checks a temperature with the flat of the hand, knowing full well that the backs of the fingers are more appropriate? Or better yet, an ear thermometer?' John would turn his palm over, test the temperature, and withdraw. It was a perfect out.

'Yes, John,' Sherlock said, the drowsiness of the sumatriptan finally kicking in, 'just like that.'

John shifted and his hand rested more comfortably on Sherlock's forehead.

'So you were right,' John said, his voice closer now, and Sherlock could pick the tiredness. He didn't know how long John had been awake, maybe even trying to rouse him, before he'd woken. Had John slept at all?

'I'm always right.' Sherlock murmured, gritting his teeth against the pull of sleep. He was _not _scared of falling asleep. He was _not. _

'It is getting worse.'

_Clear off then. _Sherlock thought.

John sighed, a heavy sound.

'Sherlock, I'm not going anywhere. Just...just let the drug work, I'll be here when you wake up.'

Sherlock's mind sank into blackness. He had a moment to ask himself if he'd spoken his thought aloud, a moment to try and decipher whether John really had just caressed his temple with the side of his thumb, if any of that had actually happened at all, before the darkness folded him into an empty space that was blessedly free of nightmares.

* * *

It took a full 48 hours for the migraine to pass, and in that time John gave him multiple doses of sumatriptan and ended up needing to duck down to the pharmacy to pick up some more. Sherlock spent a lot of time in his room, lying down, squinting up at the ceiling in the moments when he felt brave enough to open his eyes and brave the light. John didn't even bother trying to get Sherlock to eat anything on the first day.

They didn't talk much at all, over those two days. John was attentive but used the time to neaten the flat some more and do some cleaning, so that Mrs. Hudson didn't have to. The lights were kept off, and Sherlock took pleasure in listening to John effortlessly navigating the flat in the dark. Probably good night vision then. More likely; a geospatial awareness that was confident and well-honed.

Sherlock would have been bored, but it was too much effort to summon up any restlessness. When he drifted into dozes, the dreams stayed far away. He was sure he was slipping into REM cycles, but for whatever reason, Moriarty and the cavern of memories were leaving him alone.

He suspected he knew the reason. Twice now, Moriarty had told him to rest, and in those periods, the nightmares seemed to hold back. It felt so mundane to be dragged into this cycle of rest, remembrance, rest, remembrance. He had better things to do. And clearly his brain – for once – thought otherwise.

On the third day, he got out of bed, tested his head by shaking it a little, and then strode to the window and looked outside. Somewhere out there, the real Moriarty was waiting. Little insect tarsus, complete with claws and sticky tarsal pads, dug into his heart at the thought.

Moriarty should feel flattered, he thought, that his unconscious mind had singled him out as an appropriate manifestation of the self-saboteur, or whatever archetype was going through and picking out memories never deleted. Sherlock mostly felt frustrated. Why his mind felt the need to explore it all in this highly symbolic manner instead of just playing a reel of memories back to him and leaving him to sort out the damage was beyond him. He was used to understanding the way his mind worked, and using it efficiently. Everything now was _messy. _Worse, the mind palace felt wrong, skewed.

He'd gone into his mind palace twice, consciously, since the last significant nightmare with Moriarty. While awake, he had far more control over what was happening, and there had been no more memories, no more internal manifestations of villains, but things hadn't been quite right either. The damage inflicted during sleep extended into his waking hours. It was as though he had woven a complex mental tapestry over the years, and now someone was taking potshots at it. How to re-knot all those individual threads and make the thing seem whole again?

He wanted to feel useful again.

John was out of the flat, so he commandeered his computer and looked at his website to see if any interesting, new cases had come through. The glare of the screen as well as the motion of reading still hurt his eyes, so he took it slowly, and dropped more words than usual as he speed read the information in front of him. Nothing. Nothing interesting. Still, he felt like he was returning to form when he dashed off a couple of quick answers. _The gardener, _on the first. And: _Argyria, colloidal silver, stop bothering me with the consequences of your hippie supplement habits. _The second one didn't even bear typing, really, except that Sherlock had always liked the words Argyria, colloidal. They sounded pleasant in his head.

Sherlock heard John with the first precise step on the creaky steps. He pushed the laptop away from him and was digging through his CD collection when John entered, carrying two bags of shopping. He paused, when he saw Sherlock awake.

'The pain?' John said, and Sherlock took a brief second to enjoy this medical shorthand that had developed between them so quickly. He kept rifling through his CDs until he found the one he was looking for. Rachmaninoff Concertos Nos. 1 – 3, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, the Cleveland Orchestra. One of the best recordings he'd found, so far.

A puzzle piece fell in place, and Sherlock chuckled at the workings of his own subconscious. _Of course, _he thought, as he turned on the CD player and inserted the CD. He skipped forward to track four, and took a deep breath as the notes started, exhaled on a huff of amusement.

'Sherlock?' John said, waiting for an answer to his first question, and clearly wanting to know what was going on.

'Of course,' Sherlock said, as the music began, 'Thibaudet is dressed by Vivienne _Westwood.' _

'What? Who?'

Sherlock winced, a characteristic flash of frustration. He'd have to start at the _beginning. _First, the Rachmaninoff reference. Second, that Moriarty wears Westwood himself. Third, the subconscious connection. Fourth, that Thibaudet is the pianist that Sherlock thinks of second, when he thinks of Rachmaninoff. Fifth, that the pianist himself wears Westwood, tying everything together. His subconscious offering a little zing of pleasure at pieces falling together like so.

Sherlock didn't have the patience for any of that, nor did he want to explain about his mind palace, exactly _what _he was dreaming about. He felt embarrassed about it. What would he say? Moriarty's a bad man? Moriarty's _scaring _him? Childish. Ridiculous. John would laugh at him.

'_Westwood, _John.' Sherlock said, as though John was the stupid one, though in this instance he knew John didn't have nearly enough evidence to put any of it together. He closed his eyes as the rolling piano began to weave through him in colour and sensation.

'This is nice,' John said, changing the subject. '_Just _grandiose enough for you, I think.' Amusement, then, so John clearly knew the Concerto well.

'The Rach 3?' What Sherlock really meant was, _you know it? _He knew John played clarinet, but hadn't expected him to listen much outside of his instrument, or to have cultivated any sort of appreciation for classical. Though he'd never complained when Sherlock played violin (there were exceptions, like the time when Sherlock decided to experiment with trying to produce to most discordant sounds in order to find what would best work in sending Mycroft on his merry way), and though he'd never complained when Sherlock played classical music; he'd never put it on himself either. He rarely commented on it.

'Well, then, the pain's obviously not that bad. We'll stay off the triptan for now and if you need anything else I've stocked up my medical kit. But you let me know immediately if you get any auras again, or sensations of skull or neck pressure, okay, Sherlock?'

Sherlock grunted, though he wasn't really listening. There was something about the music. _Something._ He hadn't listened to Rachmaninoff for so long, over a decade, over a decade and a half. He'd just never found a reason to, since he owned an incredible amount of music, and could always compose his own or play whenever he felt like it. There was something in those notes, _something, _what was it? His brow furrowed and a frown etched its way across his face and stayed there.

'_Okay, _Sherlock?' John repeated, and Sherlock nodded absently and then waved his hand to send him away. Couldn't the man see that he was thinking?

John muttered something and walked into the kitchen to put away the shopping. Sherlock closed off the noise and withdrew into the Concerto. He could visualise the notes, and his fingers twitched, though he only had a rudimentary knowledge of the piano; he had always preferred violin.

'_You know, I've always preferred piano to violin.' _Moriarty's line, then, floating back to him. Except it wasn't Moriarty's varying cadence. It was a deeper, rougher, more jovial voice. Sherlock jerked, but the notes surrounded him in a spiral and he was caught. It was as though someone had opened the music box again, but instead of Cock Robin it was different now. The scent wood polish of university corridors. The smell of all the waxes and oils used to condition instruments. The feeling of a grand pressing up against his back. The stark sensation of confidence draining away to nothing at all and a body pressed up against him.

'I've always preferred piano to violin.' A pause, Sherlock's palms flat against the back of the Steinway. 'Some of the others are jealous of you, you know. That you come in here and play so well, even though you're not even taking music. You just use the rooms.'

A bubble of dread, of foreboding, the same sensation in those quiet moments before a bully stopped being charming and went straight to harm instead. Sherlock knew it well, by the time he reached university. He knew the full spectrum of human hatred for that which is different, or brilliant. Though for some reason, Mycroft never copped it in quite the same way. His palms moved and he pushed at the body against him. David stepped backwards, but Sherlock sensed it was only a temporary reprieve. And all the while, Rachmaninoff playing in the background, grand and imposing.

'If you would excuse me.' Sherlock had said, and David laughed.

'Oh, come on then, stay a while, would you? I always wanted to see who would dominate in a battle of wills. Violin? Piano? What do you say? Winner takes all?'

'All of _what?' _Sherlock snapped.

And in the present, Sherlock smashed the heel of his palm onto the stop button and then ejected the CD and threw it across the room with hands that were shaking, a muffled shout of irritation. He sank onto his chair and pressed his hands against the side of his hand, against his ears, blocking out the piano even though his mind kept playing the notes precisely. He jerked when a presence knelt in front of him, but it was only John, just John.

'I think,' Sherlock began, and then swallowed the rest of his sentence. Even though he'd stopped the worst of the memory, it still filtered back in slivers of detail. Sherlock knew where all of it was headed even though he could have sworn he'd never seen any of the event before his entire life. Well, except the event itself, that is. He cleared his throat.

'I think there's something wrong with me.' He said the words he hadn't wanted to say _ever, _let alone to John. Because hadn't he _always _thought that? Oh, certainly, he could compensate such dour thoughts by instead persuading himself that there was something wrong with _everyone else, _but the evidence was against him. But now that something else was wrong, something new, something different, it felt even worse. He pressed his hands harder to the side of his head, and the pressure seemed to help.

'Look, I'm going to ask you something and you're going to want to dismiss it, but I'm asking you not to. Will you please start from the beginning? Any beginning? Because this? You with nightmares and a _migraine _and being wroth at the Rach 3? I can work things out for myself, with enough time, but I would prefer you just _talk _to me.'

John was frustrated. Concerned and frustrated. Sherlock lowered shaking hands and stared hard at the man in front of him. It was John, who _hadn't_ betrayed him at the pool, who wasn't some secret villain hiding in plain sight like so much of the rest of humanity. Sherlock told himself this in the tone he often used with other people who were doubting his superior knowledge.

'I don't like to talk about matters of a personal nature.'

'Yes. I know that, Sherlock,' John said, patiently. 'I'm not asking you to suddenly become comfortable with it, or good at it. I'm just... look, here, I'll lay it out for you. I'm worried about you. I think something's going on that's upsetting you, and I think you're not accustomed to dealing with whatever it is. I think it's bad enough that you're having nightmares, I think it's bad enough that you're remembering disturbing memories that you thought you had deleted; and if I didn't know you better, I'd put forth a damn good case for you having developed some kind of post-traumatic stress after the pool incident.'

'If you didn't know me better?' Sherlock said, low and quiet. John paused, stared at him and then blinked once. He got up and sat opposite Sherlock in his own chair, reclined and sighed. Sherlock watched him, watched for judgement or rejection, and found nothing explicit, nothing that could be confirmed.

Sherlock sorted through all the possible beginnings he could think of. Childhood. Adolescence. Starting with the pool incident. Talking about the memories themselves.

But in the end, only one beginning seemed the easiest to start with.

'My mind palace, I've been building it for a long time, and I was almost certain I knew how it worked...'

And so he began.


	5. Chapter 5

**Author's Note: **This chapter references the online BBC 'Blog of Doctor John Watson,' specifically the blog post _The Great Game. _Feel free to google, though you don't need to have read it to understand the reference.

* * *

**Chapter 05  
**

Sherlock had of course mentioned his mind palace in passing before, so John knew what it was, and what it was for. However, never had Sherlock displayed a willingness to share as much about its construction, or its maintenance. Sherlock began by telling John why he'd felt the need for a mind palace; and then how he'd begun to construct it and really work at it. He realised that it had enormous potential early on, and it didn't surprise John at all when Sherlock described spending so much time building it at first, that he lost touch with day to day business and began forgetting to eat as often as he had previously.

'You already know that deleted memories are coming back, we've discussed that.' Sherlock said, and John nodded.

It felt much easier to be getting on with things when Sherlock was actually communicating with him, when he had an idea of what was going on. There was a lot he could figure out for himself; for all of Sherlock's flaws and barriers, he was not always difficult to read. They lived together well because – for the most part – they really did understand each other.

Sherlock lapsed into silence. He stared at the CD player, his face expressionless, but if John had to put money on it, he'd say that Sherlock was perplexed. Sherlock understood trauma, John was sure he'd probably researched it, searched through his mind palace and topped up his knowledge when John came to stay with him. Certainly, Sherlock would understand the _chemistry _of trauma, that would appeal to him more than the psychology of it. He'd know all about catecholamines, phenylalanine and tyrosine, noradrenaline, all the other components of a fight or flight response.

But still, John wondered if Sherlock had thought himself above all that, especially after deleting previously traumatic memories. There were few things in the world that reminded one of the unpleasantness of the physical body more completely than post-trauma syndromes and disorders. Traumata was effective at bringing the cerebral back down to earth, forcing them back into their transport. And it was obvious that Sherlock was going through just that; flashbacks and that hideous migraine, the constant nightmares.

'Sherlock,' John began, and then looked at the CD player himself, wondering how he should phrase what he was going to say next.

'Any time in the next century will do just fine.' Sherlock drawled.

'How very patient of you.' John shook his head on a smile. His face sobered. 'I know there's things you're not telling me.'

'Do you?' Sherlock said.

'Yes. Two things come immediately to mind. First, there tends to be a precipitating event for trauma. Life-threatening situations. But you experience life-threatening situations all the time. It's fair to say you even seek them out sometimes, we both know that. So it has to be something more, different, to what you were used to experiencing. The only events that come to mind are... well you'd remember, The Great Game.'

'I do _so_ hate it when you refer to real life experiences with those fictional blog titles.'

'Yep, let's argue about that one in a little bit. I was _there, _Sherlock. I saw the look on your face when I came out strapped to so much Semtex I got a punch in the gut for telling Moriarty that it was a bit overkill.'

An eyebrow rose at that, lips quirked. Sherlock's gaze slid sidelong.

'A military man's levity, then?'

'Shut up,' John said, unable to help his own responding smile. 'You're not stupid, you know exactly what I'm trying to say. Are you just hedging, or has it been so long since you've had to apply any awareness to yourself that you really just have no idea?'

Sherlock's face closed off at that, a slight frown flashed. John wanted to reach out, take his hand, remind him that he was on his side, but all of those things would have been rejected outright. If John presented a challenge, on the other hand, that was another matter entirely. Although this was one area where he knew he needed to tread gently, it was still _Sherlock. _It didn't make him feel good though, to needle and prod like this. Mostly, he thought it was tempting to just let Sherlock explain the mind palace like that was all that needed explaining. But he cared too much to just let it go that quickly. Since the migraine, he kept remembering how hesitant Sherlock had sounded when he'd asked for human contact again, _'would you check my temperature again?' _How something as simple as fingers on a forehead could offer so much to a man starved for knowledge, starved for attention, starved for care and affection and love.

'You think that because I thought your life was in danger, it added a new, unusual component to what could be perceived as a life-threatening situation and created a traumatic event for me. As a result, the metaphorical floodgates of my subconscious opened and supposedly deleted memories have been returning forthwith?'

'No.' John said, and Sherlock's eyes widened a fraction.

It wasn't just surprise that John saw there, but also the cagey desperation of a man who did not want his fears to be discovered. _Jesus, _John thought, _I could just let this go right now. I could just let him have the dignity of keeping his fears to himself. _It was all he had wanted for himself, before Mycroft and Sherlock had deconstructed his own post-war fears and left him with a hand that no longer shook and a leg that worked without pain, and less nightmares than he'd had before he'd met the Holmes brothers. And there was the rub. John appreciated the deconstruction, that laser-pointer knowledge that had given him so much of his life back.

But he doubted Sherlock would appreciate it.

Still, John spared him eye contact, and looked down at his hands resting calm on his knees. He hadn't brought up any of this with Sherlock before. He'd written about it in the blog, was sure Sherlock had read the entry, so it was a case of 'I know that he knows that I know,' but that didn't mean it suddenly became easy to bring up in conversation. And John was aware that there was guilt, too, because he had felt grateful that Sherlock had cared enough to feel hurt about it. He'd felt grateful about something that had probably lead to this confection of horror that Sherlock was now experiencing. John had seen the betrayal, but he'd done a piss poor job of interpreting the effect it would have.

'We both know that you thought I was Moriarty.'

'For a _second.' _Sherlock spat with a defensiveness that left John in no doubt that he had just hit the nail on the head.

'I know.' John said. 'With a mind like yours, that's all it would have taken.'

'Are you saying I brought this on myself?' Sherlock's voice rose, as he did, propelling himself from his chair and stalking across to the window. He stared outside like a trapped zoo animal wondering what it was like out there amongst the spectators. John could imagine a lion or tiger, some melanistic jaguar with intent eyes, wondering which one to leap upon first, where to sink in trembling claws to yield the most blood. John could see the tension practically vibrating up and down his body, and he wanted to stay seated, to stay as non-threatening as possible, but the conversation was going wrong. He stood up, held up his hands.

'No, _no, _I'm not saying that.' John took a deep breath, reframed his thoughts.

'You think I should have been smarter. Should have known.' Sherlock said, his voice even and measured with certainty. They weren't even questions, they were flat statements issued to panes of glass. John ran a hand over his face.

'No. Maybe you could try listening to _me, _instead of jumping to conclusions and-'

'Jumping to conclusions?' Sherlock rounded on him. _Cocked that up, _John thought, mentally rolling his eyes at himself. Sherlock walked right up to him, stared down at him, calculating. John was sure that Sherlock was basing his calculations off the wrong formula in this instance, but he didn't know how to say it without having that taken out of context too. So much of interacting successfully with Sherlock was employing the very tact that the man himself had misplaced years ago.

'You tell me you want to know about what's going on so you can _help_ me, followed by the assertion that it was my misperception that created the 'trauma' in the first place. Is this teaching a man to fish so that he may provide for himself? Handing me the tool to undo what I...' Sherlock's lips thinned, eyes narrowed, 'why else would you be pointing out the obvious? And it _is _obvious. You know I read your blog. That particular post. Everyone else too. Oh, it's so lovely that Sherlock cares for John. It's so _wonderful _that he cared enough to make a fundamental error and see Moriarty in his flatmate. He _cares. _Philistines. All of you.'

Sherlock jerked away, walked back to the window. John took a deep breath, held it, released it. Waited. But Sherlock was – at least temporarily – maintaining a stony silence. John saw the Rachmaninov CD in the corner of his eye. It looked so harmless, just a round disk on the floor. Frustration built in him, it demanded words and sentences.

'You haven't told me anything. I have to listen to you at night, or napping during the day, having your nightmares and I have to _guess _what's going on, because I can't confront you about it. And I know that, because I confronted you about it today, and look how well it's gone.'

Sherlock's expression had shifted. The man's profile gone from unreadable to pensive, withdrawn, _vulnerable. _Other people wouldn't have seen it. Other people weren't John. He crossed the lounge, stepped over the CD, stood a foot away from Sherlock and resisted the urge to place a comradely hand on his friend's shoulder.

'I don't think you brought this on yourself.' John said, quietly. 'I don't think you should have known. You didn't strap me into the Semtex, Sherlock. I mean, isn't that the problem? All of your...knowledge and, and control, and at the end of the day...'

John trailed off as he thought of a way to say what he was trying to. Sherlock's head had tilted slightly in his direction, listening closely then.

'I spent all that time in Afghanistan, trained to avoid the enemy, you know. And it takes coming back to London to realise how easy it is to be made powerless by some consulting criminal who wants me to be the final pip. I'm _trained, _Sherlock. You don't think I've asked myself if I should have known better? I've gone over it in my head a thousand times. I should have known better. I should have done differently. For a start, I should have bloody well known you were sending me away so you could go get yourself in trouble again.'

'Yes, John, appreciate the empathy, but I'm not so ordinary to be caught out like that,' Sherlock said, but the cutting tone was missing, and the disdain fell flat.

'No, you're not so ordinary.' John acknowledged. 'But neither is Moriarty.'

'And for a second, a _second, _neither were you.' Sherlock said, his voice quiet. His head tilted forward and stopped just before resting on the cool glass, as though Sherlock wouldn't even allow himself that much support.

'Because I was him.' John said, shaking his head. It hit him, in a way that it hadn't before, what that actually _meant. _Beyond his own myopic vision of a Sherlock that gave a damn, he imagined what it could have meant, to experience that. To realise in a moment that all your genius still didn't stop you from living with your greatest enemy, perceiving him as a friend, trusting him on cases, allowing him to interact on crimes. John closed his eyes and sighed.

'I'm an idiot.' He said.

'Yes, well.' Sherlock replied, and John laughed.

'No, I mean, aside from my regular idiocy that you apparently have to contend with on a daily basis.'

'You're right, this is helping me. Lambast away. It turns out I like hearing you admit your idiocy.' Sherlock said, and John picked up the humour, the amusement. He felt relief. He reached out a hand and placed it on Sherlock's shoulder, and couldn't ignore the minute flinch, the increased tension. He left it there for three seconds, and then removed it, and watched the way Sherlock's eyes followed the movement of his hand. He opened his mouth to say something, when Sherlock's phone beeped.

He brought his mobile out, opened the message, and it was there for both he and John to see.

_Got a case for you. One of the weird ones. Brompton Rd Sta. MoD entrance._

They stared at the message. John was sure that Sherlock was going to trounce away and get ready in a flash, pleased to have something else to focus on, marching out with John following loyally behind. But instead he just looked at his phone and stayed by the window, John by his side waiting for Sherlock to make the next move. His eyes flicked up to the man's face, and he noticed that Sherlock looked a little dazed. His eyes weren't moving as he looked at his phone.

'Could be a good distraction.' John offered, after it seemed clear that Sherlock wasn't going to move.

'Hm?' Sherlock looked at John and then back at the text message, as though he was seeing it for the first time. 'Probably dull. Do you think I need a good distraction?'

John walked away and got the medical kit he took with him out on cases. It was smaller than the one he kept at home, since what he usually needed for his work with Sherlock was very different to what he suspected he might need at Baker Street, should Sherlock ever be injured by one of his experiments. He knew how horrific chemical burns could be.

He opened his mouth to answer, but at that moment, Sherlock did spin and march into his room. John heard the clatter of coat-hangers, the sound of post-migraine clothes being exchanged for what he wore to cases. John was concerned. But Sherlock was no ordinary man, and he was no ordinary doctor, and he knew he'd have to tread carefully. He also wanted some time for himself, to sort through his own feelings on the matter. He didn't have much time, or use, for guilt – it could be crippling when out in the field, and one needed to make snap medical decisions. But still, a heavy ache flushed his chest as he thought of how happy he'd felt after the incident at the pool, the happiness of someone who cared about Sherlock and wanted more evidence that Sherlock had felt similarly.

It had been short-sighted of him; naive. Firstly, he'd had evidence of Sherlock's care for him before, he had just wanted something more concrete, something that made his suffering through Sherlock's callous or distant ways more valid. Secondly, he had learned some time ago that it was important to accept the man for who he was, and not who he could become. So perhaps it was the Semtex, or the fact that he'd been shaken himself, to be caught so by Moriarty and his cronies, but he'd just wanted _proof _that what he'd gone through meant something to Sherlock.

He got his proof, but the price wasn't worth it.

When Sherlock exited his room, he was already pulling on his gloves and slipping into work mode. John followed, happy for Sherlock to take the lead.

* * *

Cab rides could go one of two ways, usually. The first, Sherlock and John chattered or bickered, and filled the drive with a constant flow of banter. The second, Sherlock sunk into silence and occupied his thoughts on the case, or a personal matter, or something else entirely. It was the latter now, and Sherlock stared fixedly out of the window, his hands clasped together on his lap.

John didn't mind. This was something he could deal with. Sherlock dealing with his issues in this sustained silence and predictable patterns was a consistency that they both needed. This was not nightmares or a flashback or a migraine. This was something approaching equilibrium.

Sherlock shifted and drew his phone out of his coat and then started sending off a message with his impossibly quick thumbs. Even gloved, they were unerring.

A moment later, John's phone beeped. He looked at Sherlock, who ignored him.

_In what other ways do you think you're an idiot? We could make a game of this. SH_

John laughed, shook his head at the text message and put his phone back in his pocket. When he risked another glance at Sherlock, he saw a telltale quirk of the lips and felt a rush of warmth.

Yes, this was definitely approaching equilibrium.

* * *

Equilibrium disappeared as they followed Lestrade through the dusty, disused tunnels that were lit with the gloomy yellow of old service lamps and the cold blue of flashlights. Sherlock's eyes were roving, cataloguing, and he had an inordinate amount of knowledge about the old Brompton Station that made John imagine a time when Sherlock spent most of his time investigating the Underground in the hopes of finding dead bodies. As soon as he thought about it, John knew it was probably true. Especially when Sherlock was first establishing his homeless network.

But when they came to a large descending staircase whose entrance and subsequent stairs were lit only by the cold blue of flashlights, a dim light at the bottom, Sherlock stopped. His feet planted, his eyes stopped moving, they couldn't seem to move away from that locus of dim light waiting for them at the bottom of the stairs.

At first, John thought that Sherlock had seen something, and he followed the man's gaze into the darkness. But then he saw the way Sherlock's hand fisted in his pocket, a spasm of the throat that was a swallow held in check.

'Go on ahead.' John told Lestrade, who nodded and moved down the stairs easily.

Sherlock was not claustrophobic.

'Sherlock...' John said, quietly.

'It's fine, John.' Sherlock said, on autopilot. His head jerked, he blinked hard, and then he was descending the staircase rapidly as though nothing had happened. John made a note to return to this later, to ask about it, at the very least, to remember that Sherlock manifested distress in ways that probably weren't obvious to the average person. Then he followed more slowly behind, absurdly grateful that he no longer had his limp, which had made stairs a chore.

* * *

The body – all things being equal – was not disgusting or butchered or brutally executed. A young man, lying on his side in the thick layers of dust, his own clothing and hair free of the beige, silty stuff. Disturbed footsteps around him, to and from the body, but a lot of that from the boots of law enforcement and John trusted that Sherlock would know how to differentiate them all and pick out the steps of a perpetrator or perpetrators. Sherlock was already moving about decisively, taking samples, directing the forensic photographer with stern points of his finger. That boot-print. That one. No, you imbecile, _that _one.

John took his time approaching the body. A part of his thoughts were always with Sherlock at a case. Always waiting to jump in and remind him about timing or something not being good. And also; a strange, misplaced concern that he'd had since the beginning. Concern that Sherlock would find the murder too exciting. Too motivating. Too _something._ At 221B he didn't feel like a handler. In the cab, he didn't feel like anything more than a friend and a doctor. At the actual crime-scene itself, he felt like it was his professional duty to keep an eye on the man.

Which was ridiculous, because Sherlock had clearly gotten along fine – fine enough that Lestrade kept coming back to him – before John came along. As John knelt carefully by the body, it occurred to him that maybe he was just manufacturing these roles in Sherlock's life because he wanted to feel needed. It was a knowledge he'd become forcefully aware of when a dying comrade, spitting and violent in his death had grabbed him by his sweaty MTP camos and told him, blood and bile leaking out of his mouth, 'and _you, _getting something out of this are you?' And it had been nothing more than a throwaway line from a dying man but it was one of those things – John tended to remember the lines of the dying – and he'd thought about it that evening and made it into something much more than a pained, spiteful dig at him for living shrapnel free and making it into the next hour intact and breathing. A realisation that yes, actually, he was getting something out of it. Something crucial and fundamental. Something that he didn't think he'd find again when he came back.

But he found it again with Sherlock. Yes, John thought, as he examined the eyes with a flashlight, he did like to feel needed.

While the way Sherlock operated in a case was not routine, there was still a sense of routine in being on a case with Sherlock. First there was the mostly-silence of observation and the snapped off sentences and one word vague revelations that came with examining the evidence. Then there was Sherlock's impatience as John examined the body and enjoyed the adrenaline rush of trying to find something that Sherlock wouldn't have been able to find himself. Then sample collections. There were a lot of them today.

And then John would sometimes find himself waiting for the moment when Sherlock would deign to explain what he'd found to the awaiting audience. It didn't happen every time, but he did enjoy it. He got the sense that Sherlock was used to captivating his audience by first reminding him how deplorably stupid they were. Sherlock threw insults at his audience, hammering at them like a chef with a piece of meat and a meat tenderiser. Whereas John was already captivated, and the insults tended to slide off him now. He thought of the insults as the pre-show entertainment, though some could be _very _barbed.

This time, however, there were hardly any Detectives and law enforcement around, because the space was dark and oppressive and Ministry of Defence, and narrow and they had clearly attempted to minimise the dust disturbance. The air was murky and stifling and held onto the damp, musty smells of mould and the thicker smell of decay with its savoury-sweetness that even now, told John things about the dead man before him.

Sherlock knelt alongside John and leaned over the body, invading with hands and fingers, feeling up into a sleeve there, ducking into a collar, checking the backs of the knuckles, pursuing flashes of thought that John couldn't follow.

A small noise in the back of the throat and Sherlock's nostrils flared as he tried to catch a scent. He bent closer to the face, closer again.

'I know that. It's...' Sherlock hesitated, his eyes narrowed and then widened, as though he were shocked at himself. John felt his own eyes widen as he watched Sherlock pause before finishing his sentence. Clearly he didn't know what it was. It was eluding him.

'Mind palace?' John suggested, wondering if Sherlock just needed to refresh his knowledge on the subject. Just because Sherlock was experiencing difficulties with it didn't mean that he couldn't go there at all, Sherlock had confirmed that he could still visit while conscious.

'It's _gone.' _Sherlock said, and stood up, creating a plume of dust and prompting a murmur of unhappiness from Lestrade, who no doubt was always painfully aware of just how much Sherlock could compromise a crime scene and how much paperwork it would mean for he and his team later.

John watched as Sherlock walked to the concave wall and stared at the tiles as though they would yield something interesting. Lestrade didn't seem to notice that anything significant was up, but he didn't have the benefit of being privy to nightmare after sodding nightmare, and John stood up and left the dead body to move close enough to Sherlock that he could see the side of his face. That blank look again. Frustration in the downward tilt of his lips. A hard gaze, as though the tiles were deliberately thwarting him.

'The mind palace is gone?' John said, hesitantly, quietly, as Lestrade moved a few steps away from them to look at a large disused motor covered in so much dust that its original material could no longer be determined.

'No.' Sherlock pursed his lips as his eyes tracked the tiles now, he actually _was _looking for something. He leaned in and sniffed the dust, sneezed and sniffed again. Seemingly satisfied, he said. 'But it's damaged.'

'Damaged?'

Sherlock brought a container out of his pocket and took a scraping of dust that was a slight shade darker than the dust around it. He capped it and put it back and then turned to look at the body again. His eyes roved hungrily, looking for new information, finding it, but then he looked in the direction of John, his eyes averted towards the ground.

'He blew it up. The section devoted to parasites, fungi, slime mould, moss. I've been rebuilding it, but it seems that a lot of the working knowledge I had is gone.'

'Who blew it up?' John's mind scrambling now. Who blew it up, if not Sherlock? And it wasn't just the flashbacks then, the mind palace was being actively damaged? A point towards the seriousness of post-trauma, but he already had enough points in that column and he wanted more sense and more to work with and he wanted to erase that subtle doubt he saw vibrating through his friend.

'A...figment. An Asterion. A minotaur in the contemporary sense.' Sherlock said, with a wry smile.

'Who? Who is _he_?' John insisted, his hands itched to reach out, do something more than just stand here like they were talking evidence and a case when instead they were talking about subject matter that would have been better suited to the privacy of 221B, the comfort of home, where tea and private spaces abounded. Lestrade was looking at them now, and Sherlock had noticed. His lips thinned.

'We'll take the case!' Sherlock announced, and Lestrade's face brightened, though there was a residual worry there that made John think that the Detective Inspector hadn't missed as much as he'd assumed. The man was often so unobtrusive in his interactions with Sherlock and John, that he found it easy to forget that he'd had five years previous experience with the consulting detective before he'd come along.

'I'll need the body sent to Miss Hooper.'

Sherlock was already turning and heading back up the stairs, and John followed with a look over his shoulder. Lestrade's face was mostly in shadow as he shifted, but John saw him watching them leave, saw the hunch to the shoulders. John had the fleeting thought that if things got out of hand, if he needed someone else to talk to, Lestrade might actually be an option.

* * *

'Any ideas about the body?' John said, after the silence of the cab, the silence of crossing the pathway, the silence of entering into the flat and feeling awkward for a second as Sherlock started hunting around his stacks of books for a particular title. He was crawling on his hands and knees, head tilted, scrutinising the titles, and then he paused.

His head popped up over a pile of antique books.

'You _must _have worked it out for yourself by now.'

'We can't all be as gifted as-'

'Yes, but this one is _easy! _Consider that I am missing an entire swathe of information on fungi and I knew within a few minutes what the cause of death was.'

'Then why did you take the case?'

'I need to know what the fungus is. It's maddening, the case isn't _solved_ unless I know. I have a book here somewhere...' His head disappeared again, and then he made an 'AHA!' of victory, followed by the sound of a heavy tower of mostly hardback books tumbling down as he tugged the one he needed from the bottom of the stack. A muffled 'ow' followed, and John smiled as he turned the pages of the newspaper on the desk, scanning for anything interesting and finding nothing of particular note.

And then John suddenly realised what the cause of death was.

'You don't think it's murder.' John said, turning around to face a gangly pile of limbs and concentration flipping rapidly through an ancient book. 'Cause of death; anaphylaxis due to fungal exposure? Mould?'

'If you say it without the questioning tone, you might even begin to sound like a _real _doctor.'

'You do know that Scotland Yard have their very own laboratories and their very own fancy, high-tech machines that can detect what specific strain of mould or...whatever, that it is, don't you?'

'It's the principle.' Sherlock muttered, as he flicked back and forth between ten pages, scanning the text with rapid eye movements. And then all movement stopped, and he stilled and then eased from his awkward crouch into a graceful kneel. John waited for an elucidation of the principle itself, but instead he found himself observing the fixed position, the stare, and he tried a different tack.

'How's your head? Any disorientation? Sensations of pressure? Dizziness?'

A single shake of the head. No pending migraine then.

'Who blew it up? The section of your mind palace? What happened?'

A silent but visible inhale, and Sherlock's eyes flickered over to John's briefly before flickering away again. A lot of subjects made Sherlock uncomfortable; sentiment, understanding the finer nuances of emotion, being lead into discussions on why social mores and things like 'timing' were important. So John, in many ways, was familiar with this lack of ease. But he didn't enjoy it. Always, in the back of his mind, the knowledge that even Sherlock thought his mental situation would get worse before it got better played like a suspenseful record, a waterphone playing soft but sinister in the background.

'Why don't you want to tell me?' John said. And then he had a horrible thought. 'Oh god, it's me isn't it? It's-'

'No!' Sherlock said, genuinely shocked. He stood up; the book forgotten, on the floor. 'I find this all tedious. This explication of subconscious wanderings and...internal mishaps. And what would you gain from knowing?'

John had no adequate answer for that. Or, rather, he had about ten of them, but they all involved sentences like 'because I could help you,' or 'because frankly I'm interested,' or 'because it's important to talk about these things,' all sentences that he knew Sherlock would likely reject. He had no answer that he thought might cross the bridge between them, and instead he chose silence.

And into that silence, Sherlock said:

'Moriarty.'

There was a beat, and then John laughed weakly in a mixture of horror and belief-that-wanted-to-be-denial, and Sherlock's eyes narrowed, the gaze pinned him unerringly. It was filled with anger and something more vulnerable, something not unlike betrayal. _Shit. _

'No, Sherlock, wait, I'm not lau-'

He was cut off. Sherlock had bent down, picked up the heavy book on fungi of Britain and slammed it shut. John found himself unable to speak as Sherlock walked off to his own room and closed the door behind him with a bang.

* * *

**More author's notes: **Apologies for the delay! I work as an artist (DA Ravenari, if you're interested), and my schedule has gotten tres busy. Also, reviews make me obscenely happy. 3 Thanks for reading, you guys, this fandom is lovely. If only writing fic was always my division.


	6. Chapter 6

**Warnings: **Not-too-graphic description of rape in this chapter, but is still triggery subject matter. Also, more Sherlock!Whump. There's some hurt-comfort too, don't worry. Mostly though; angst. Aaaaaangst.

* * *

**06**

The bang of the door jarred in his ears, and he was forcefully reminded that it wasn't so long ago that he was weakly wondering when his next dose of sumatriptan was coming, and if he could wheedle John into giving him more than was medically recommended. He paused by his bed, one hand straying up to his forehead and the other gently placing the book on the covers. He could read it later, when he didn't feel as though a timpani had just been struck off in his cerebral cortex.

He'd not expected to be quite so confronted by the ghastly tunnel at Brompton, leading _down _into the depths. Once such a sight would have filled him with excitement, and now, since that awful cavern faux-Moriarty had constructed, it filled him with dread. All at once he'd remembered the wetness of the man's mouth along his jawline, the squeezing of two vicious hands, and then an abrupt segue into the intrusive memory of David and his borrowed university Steinway, the 'winner takes all' game that had a terrible ending that Sherlock didn't remember and didn't _want _to remember, and he knew how absurd it was, how utterly absurd, that he – of all people – didn't want to know something.

And John, out there, the laughter had cut too close. Too close to what? It didn't matter. It was irrelevant. But a quick rehashing of the events and he knew that John wasn't laughing _at _him, and that he was just trying to help.

It wouldn't do.

He exhaled, placed both his palms flat on the bed and shook his head to try and clear it. He wasn't running efficiently, all of his cylinders were not firing at speed, the frenetic fast-tracked train and jangling tracks were too off-key, off-colour. It was all wrong. It was 2,700-3000k on the colour spectrum, when he wanted over 5000k instead.

He walked out of his room within only a minute, and John stopped walking towards Sherlock's room and his face held the same shock and dismay it had held only a minute before. _There, _Sherlock though, _evidence. _Evidence that he didn't mean it. It bothered Sherlock how much this mattered to him. How invested he was in John's care.

And then they said at the same time:

'I think post-migraine fatigue has-'

'I was just shocked, that's all, I'm-'

They stopped and Sherlock felt frustration that they were stalled like this. John smiled ruefully and then noticed that Sherlock's hand was hovering uncertainly at the back of his head. He dropped it immediately, but it didn't stop John's brow furrowing, or the instant frown.

'It's nothing.' Sherlock said hastily.

'It's not.' John said, in that tone that promised it would turn into an argument if they kept talking about it. Sherlock said nothing. He didn't want another argument. He wanted things that he couldn't bring back just by thinking about it very hard, like his whole font of knowledge on fungi. _That _made him grind his teeth together, and that was doing nothing for the slow, percussive throb at the back of his head.

'Paracetamol?' Sherlock said, hopefully, and John's expression turned to a grimace of sympathy.

'I'll make you some toast to go with it. Go and sit down.'

'You don't need toast with paracetamol.' Sherlock said in protest, as he made his way to the kitchen table and started to set his microscope aside before getting distracted by it. He tinkered around with it and the slide for a little while and then tugged the newspaper towards him that John had been looking at before. _Dull. _He tapped his fingers instead. Tapped and tapped until John turned and tilted his head, and combined with the set of his eyes, indicated profound irritation. Sherlock's fingers tapped out another two measures to make a point, _I don't care what you think, _and then he stopped. He gathered his palms together and rested the bridge of his nose on the tips of his index fingers.

He watched John move about the kitchen with that steady confidence; the body parts rarely bothered him now, and he knew where everything was. As John made most of the food, he had disturbed Sherlock's 'system' a while ago, and no ranting convinced John to change things back to the way they were. He found he liked it now, the jams being in that rickety cupboard that creaked just so as it was opened, and the tea in the new canister that had never held aging toenails as the previous one had.

Sherlock expected John to pick up where they had left off. He waited for the questions. Why Moriarty? What do you mean the information about fungi is gone? How's your head? But they didn't come. He watched John spread the raspberry and rhubarb jam that they were both partial to on three pieces, and then another single piece of toast was covered liberally with marmite; that one was obviously for John. Tea was set out, and they had an unusual amount of food at the moment, since John had spent the three days of the migraine trying to tempt him with all sorts of flavour profiles. There were even pastries.

It wasn't long before a plate of toast and two capsules were set in front of him, along with a glass of water and a cup of tea.

'What if I'm not hungry?' Sherlock said.

'Then that's too bad for you, isn't it? Because I'm going to sit here and watch you eat something; at this point you could have a headache from low blood sugar and lack of food over the past few days, or you could have another damn migraine on the way, and we wouldn't be able to tell the difference because you eat less than a-'

'Yes, _alright.' _Sherlock said, frowning at the plate before him. He could rarely tell if he was hungry, especially because the case wasn't officially solved and he still didn't _know _the specific strain of mould that had caused the problem and he couldn't just duck into his mind palace to figure it out. He loathed eating on cases. He needed to spend all his time in his head, not in his lumbering transport, and food brought one out of the cerebral and into the body, the alimentary system no less.

He dry-swallowed the tablets and then followed it up with a small bite into some toast. John put less jam on the toast than he usually liked, but that was understandable because no one in the right mind would empty a quarter of a jam jar on a single piece of toast and as it was, John had put far more jam on than average anyway. It was still sugary, but Sherlock had decided a long time ago that jam toast wasn't properly 'jam toast' if he could taste the actual toast itself.

When he took his second bite, John started his own piece and instead of looking at the newspaper, or the microscope, or focusing on something else, he maintained a steady eye contact. Sherlock held it for a while, impassive and perhaps more tired than he'd realised earlier, and then he had to look down when a dollop of jam fell onto his plate. He chased it with an index finger, and then glared at it. Eating always made him more aware of his body. There was a persistent ache across his shoulder blades, a griping pain that connected his neck to his lumbar spine, and the throb in his head was easing – perhaps – but there was still remnants of benign paroxysmal positional vertigo and there was the faintest hint of dizziness even though he was sitting upright, and still.

'Okay,' John said, and Sherlock braced himself, 'let me...see if I understand. You have a mind palace. Moriarty is now in it, I'm going to assume he wasn't a regular fixture before, since we only really just met him. He blew part of it up. You thought I betrayed you. You're remembering previous memories that were experienced as traumatic, that you thought were deleted. It's affecting your cases. And apparently you used to get migraines?'

The silence was only broken by Sherlock crunching on toast and refusing to dignify any of that with an answer.

'Well, you've been in the wars then, haven't you?'

A huff of laughter escaped from Sherlock and he put the toast down. It had been a while since he'd heard that phrase, the last time had been from Mrs. Hudson, when he'd turned a cold into pneumonia that time he'd taken an involuntary swim in the Thames while trying to catch a murderer. There was a certain irony hearing it from someone who actually _had _been in a war. In an instant, Sherlock had a vision of John's mother soothing him when he came home from school, or looking after him at the end of a bad day, it was something parents said to their sick children.

'I'm surprised you're not more upset.' John said, sipping at his tea.

'I'm sure I could summon up some more ire and wrath if you so desire, but I find that after three days of forced bed-rest because my brain case feels entirely too small for a brain composed of what might as well be broken glass, I don't want to go storming around all of England. It won't last, though. I'll be back to being myself in no time at all. You should enjoy it while it lasts.' Sherlock added.

'Because this is great fun.' John said, his voice serious and tone lowered. Sherlock looked up at him and frowned. When he didn't say anything, John continued.

'You always end wondering about people, as a doctor, I think. You see a lot of repressed trauma come back to bite people out in the field, you know. It happens a lot. You start to get a sense of the ones who might have more than their fair share of it.'

'You thought I might be one of them.' Sherlock said, putting down his toast and pushing the plate away. He was done. Whatever stomach hormones like ghrelin were communicating to him, weren't speaking loudly enough.

'No, well, maybe, I didn't know.' John was uncomfortable now, Sherlock could see it in the way he wouldn't make eye contact. 'You had this dream, nightmare, a few nights ago. You were telling someone that they hit like a pansy. It was clear you were upset. And that they were hitting you.' John folded his arms and now faced Sherlock squarely, and these were the sort of confrontations that Sherlock had been dreading. The who was it? And who did it? And if it had been anyone else, he would have left the room, the flat, but it wasn't anyone else. It was John, whose soothing fingers had been soft and cool on his burning forehead. John who might genuinely care, as opposed to Mycroft or Mummy, who showed a different species of care altogether.

'My father.' Sherlock said, deciding it wasn't worth prevaricating. He steepled his hands and looked firmly at his microscope.

'Jesus,' John said, the way he sometimes did when the victim was too young, or too brutalised, or they hadn't got there in time. Sherlock was torn between leaving because he didn't especially feel like having this conversation (the part of his mind that dealt with physical issues kept trying to remind him that it had been a bastard of a day and perhaps he'd like to lie down for a few minutes), or staying because John's reaction was so unlike Mycroft's, when he'd found out.

'I have been informed I was a horrid child.' Sherlock said. John half-smiled.

'I can believe that. Sounds like your father was a horrid father.'

'Had to get half my genetic material from somewhere.' Sherlock said, and then reached up to push at one of his temples, to see if that would do anything about the pain. 'You don't seem all that surprised.' He added.

'I'm not.' John said. 'I'm a lot of things, right now, but I'm not surprised.'

'Let me guess, appropriately outraged on my behalf, all of that dreck that ordinary, obvious people indulge themselves in?'

'Right on the nose.' John said, his voice had an edge to it now, and Sherlock could tell he was annoying him, but he wasn't entirely sure why. This sitting down and talking over a meal, if it could be called that, had entirely too many unknowns, too many variables, he reached for his microscope and tugged it back to him, pressed his eye against the ocular lens and tuned out the sounds of John clearing away the plates. Focused on nothing else but the chitin on the slide before him. He had wanted to broaden his knowledge on the industrial uses of the polymer derived from glucose, and the research had been neglected of late.

Time passed, he jotted down shorthand in his notebook, and he was able to ignore the pain in his back and shoulders, and even the pain in his head was not so bad. He hoped he had skipped another migraine. Once upon a time they used to come so forcefully that resuming work at his regular pace would simply bring them back. Once it took almost a month before he slowed down enough to halt the horrific cycle, and then he had utilised the assistance of home-made meconium, and then opium to help. That had turned into its own horrific cycle. The stuff may have been obsolete by modern standards, but he'd like the heritage of opium; involving himself in that rich, steeped history.

His fingers tightened on the focus wheel when someone tried to move the microscope away from him. _But I'm not done. _

'Humour me.' It was John. Sherlock blinked and wondered how much time had passed. The table was clear of food, the Baker Street medical kit was sitting open on the table. A stethoscope, tympanic thermometer, more sumatriptan if necessary, was already laid out.

'I don't think this is necessary.'

'What did I just say?' John said, and Sherlock allowed John to move the microscope safely to the side. A moment later the notepad and the pen followed. A brief, internal battle set itself up in Sherlock's mind. On the one hand, this really wasn't necessary. He was certain another migraine wasn't coming. He had work to do. He could – at the very least – be researching that specific species of mould that had caused the (boring) allergic reaction. And on the other hand, he wondered if he could find a way to rope John into feeling his forehead again. He wanted a safe proximity. Having it under the guise of medical attention was appealing. Sherlock watched John put his stethoscope to his ears and frowned, it was ridiculous that he even wanted the man near him, was the friendship and him putting up with Sherlock's living habits not enough?

His heart was pronounced fine and healthy, and Sherlock muttered an 'of course,' as John stayed near him, physical presence warm and making his skin prickle with awareness.

Next, the press of the tympanic thermometer. This brought discomfort with it. Discomfort because Sherlock wanted inaccurate fingers, not that blasted contraption. Discomfort because the labyrinth of his inner ear was not quite settled yet, there was no easy adjustment to changes in his orientation to gravity. The push alone, so close to the source of his dizziness, made one of his hands flex on the table. He closed his eyes and couldn't entirely hide his wince.

'Mm.' John said, waiting for the beep. 'I'm sorry. I don't think you're quite out of the woods yet. But,' as the beep sounded, 'your temperature is fine.'

'I did say unnecessary.'

But then he closed his mouth as John's hand did find its way to Sherlock's forehead, cool skin pressing against the warmer skin, _contact. _It was inane, Sherlock thought, it was inane how much he liked this. He hated the way it wasn't entirely in his mental control that he leaned forward minutely into those fingers. He was sure that this was just a very simple matter of his body – so unused to comforting touch – firing off too many hormones and chemicals, disproportionate responses to closeness, too much hunger and greed for something he didn't, hadn't needed to survive so far.

When John placed a light but sure hand on the back of his neck, Sherlock flinched. John murmured something unintelligible, like he was soothing an animal, and Sherlock wanted to say something, he had an insult ready, but instead he remembered his favourite horse; the one his father rode all the time without his permission. He remembered gentling it with apples and sugar, adding molasses to oats. That had been an entirely different time, he'd been a different person. Those had been the days when he still allowed himself to attach to other creatures, when it had been safer. And Tiberius had been worthy of that trust, all that time ago.

'I used to ride.' Sherlock said, his voice gone deep and lax with a tiredness he didn't want to admit to. He felt half-drugged. With John standing near him like this, and two points of contact, he didn't need the sumatriptan, his body was washing him with its own warming, relaxing chemicals.

'Yeah?' John said, a thread of surprise, amusement even.

'Yes.'

'Do you miss it?'

Sherlock blinked, he hadn't considered whether he missed it. There had been university and expectations and then breaking and betraying those expectations and the _Work _which had saved him, and he didn't even know what had happened to Tiberius. Whether his father had sold him off when he was too old to work the dressage arenas properly, whether he was minced for dog meat or allowed to retire and lead an indulgent life that first world countries could provide their loved and no-longer-useful animals.

'I suppose you would consider it a waste of your time now.' John speculated. The fingernails on the back of his neck turned into fingerpads caressing the skin there; once, and then twice. And first Sherlock thought, 'what?' and then 'oh,' and then he worried that John wanted too much, something he couldn't give back, he had never been interested in sex. Never. But John _knew _that, surely.

'Perhaps.' Sherlock said, shifting his shoulders to indicate that he didn't want John to stop. When John started moving his fingers again, Sherlock decided that he would cross the bridge of 'I'm not interested in _that,' _later. John wasn't offering that now, was he? This was fine, wasn't it? 'It helped me think. I had too many thoughts, back then, and no mind palace, no tools to corral. Mycroft assisted me where he could, once he realised that I was born with the family intelligence. But his was always steadier, I think, it succumbed to his self-control at an earlier age. I had my father's temper, not Mummy's temperance.'

'You don't really talk about it. Your childhood.' John said, and Sherlock's fingers fretted at the edge of the table. It didn't come with a judgemental tone, but all the same, it felt like judgement. He would blame the migraine for this lapse in self-control.

Time passed, and the rhythmic movement of the fingers on the back of his neck lulled him. He came to rely on the steady hand that braced his forehead even though he was sure that John's arm was probably hurting right now. Especially as the one reached out awkwardly, not resting on the back of his neck, was the arm connected to the shoulder that was shot.

'This isn't going work.' John said, an amused warmth in his voice.

'What isn't?'

'_This._ At this rate, you're going to develop Munchausen's just to get some sort of physical care or comfort from other people.'

'Not other people.' Sherlock murmured. 'You.'

He wondered if he'd regret saying that later. _Likely. _An alarming thread of regret was already spiralling its way up his spinal cord. When John removed the hand from his forehead, Sherlock knew he'd made an error. He lifted his head to say something, relying on the walls that words could erect around him, but John was already shaking his head.

'No, no, my shoulder is just a bit, I mean...it's fine.'

'Is it?' Sherlock said, but he meant more than just the touch on the back of his neck. Is it fine? What he just said? All those neat boundaries they'd had, and he'd gone and infringed on yet another one.

John sighed, and then all contact was gone, and Sherlock knew that this is what would happen. The withdrawal, the removal, and then all the boundaries would chink back into place because that was what John excelled at, making sure that everything was in its proper place. And Sherlock wanting this, seeking it, that was not _proper, _and it did not have a _place. _Dimly, it occurred to him, this was what all that ordinary, mundane trauma had reduced him to. Perfectly sound analysis. Life hurts, one wishes for comfort. But he was not ordinary. He was not mundane. He could rise above this. Sherlock straightened and he reached for his microscope because he really wasn't done with that slide, and then he actually – embarrassingly – flinched hard when John placed a hand on his wrist.

And then, just like that, he was _done. _This was a weak moment. He should not be sharing these things with other people. Years of self-mastery and this was what he had to show for it? Pathetic.

He stood up and the chair clattered behind him, nearly tilted and fell with the force of the backwards movement, but his graceful hand steadied it.

John had been pulling out his own chair to sit next to Sherlock, he looked confused at this sudden turn of events.

'Sherlock?' He asked.

'I have work to do.' Sherlock said, and had his wallet in his pocket and his keys, and he patted his coat pocket to check that his phone was still there (it was). It didn't take long to locate his scarf, and he already had his shoes on from earlier. He would go out. He would go to Barthes'. Maybe the body had already been delivered.

'Where are you going? You should be, could you not just take a night off?' John said, eyes wider now, asking questions. What happened? What did I do? Did I do something wrong?

'A night off? I've been resting and sleeping and sedated for the past three days, John, I think I can handle a simple overnighter.' There, the confidence, the sureness in his voice. Sherlock found it convincing.

'Sherlock-' A firmness now, a willingness to argue the point, but Sherlock merely flashed him what was surely a maddening grin, and then left the flat, closing the door behind him and jogging down the steps faster than John could follow.

* * *

The body _hadn't _been delivered yet, the coroners must be held up, or maybe they were still collecting evidence. Not that much time had elapsed, after all.

Molly wasn't in, and he vaguely remembered that she was taking time off to do...something that hadn't seemed remotely relevant at the time when she had told him. He didn't remember. But he had other ongoing experiments he could work on. First things first though, he pulled up one of the databases dealing with fungi and started the process of reading through all the files and committing the ones that seemed especially relevant to memory. It wasn't years of research and experimentation and hard-won knowledge, but it was better than nothing, and he filed it all into his sorting chamber, where his eidetic memory allowed him to go back through it all later and reinforce it, place it where he wanted it to go.

It was time-consuming labour, and minutes became hours as he scanned each entry, scanned the references at the end, made himself promise to double check it all later. Running concurrently was the hope that any bit of knowledge, no matter how tiny, would trigger a cascade of remembrances about this information. Would allow him to see that the room on fungi hadn't been destroyed after all, just misplaced or slightly harmed. But the more time passed, the more he began to give up on the notion, since nothing was refreshing his memory, and it really did seem to be gone.

This engendered a new frustration. So he couldn't delete his own memories adequately, but some freewheeling chaotic part of his unconscious could do it in but a moment?

It was past midnight when he paused to take a brief break, a short pace around the lab, perusing the work of others. He had several missed messages and calls, hadn't heard the alert sounds because he had been working and it hadn't been important. He didn't want to deal with John right now. John who wasn't helping him reconstruct his palace, but seemed determined to dig fingers into the vulnerable parts. John the caretaker. It was only natural, Sherlock decided, that John would take up that role.

But it wasn't practical. He knew from experience that he couldn't properly function with those memories in the forefront of his mind. And touch distracted. Trauma was a free radical. It didn't matter how nice the former felt, it was all inconvenient.

Still, he did need sleep. It was around 3.00am, looking through scholarly articles on moulds, that he rested his head on the bench. _Thirty minutes, _he told his circadian rhythm, _thirty minutes only. _It was usually a reliable alarm clock, his body didn't pay much attention to endogenous triggers or appropriate, entrainable environmental oscillations. At times like this, he could rely on the computer that was his mind.

Thirty minutes was all he needed.

* * *

Wood polish. Wax. Resin. Whorls in wood-grains and an open violin case, the mumbled voices of university students in the corridors and dread thumping and pulsing all the way up from his esophagus into his throat, and further still, until it stabbed behind his eyes in white and cadmium yellow. A piano at his back, but he was already stepping away, furious.

'All of _what?' _He'd snapped at David, who laughed full-throated. David, one of those prodigal, scholarship students who was still a cocky, arrogant shit. A music student who spent every night drinking and fucking and drugging himself silly and coming back to class and still getting the grades he needed to stay top of his game. Sherlock had beaten him now in a few exams, more than a few, and their encounters had gotten more tense every time they'd met.

'Name your odds.'

'I'd like to know the game first.' Sherlock said, closing his violin case and picking it up, ready to leave. David baited him. David had worldly knowledge and the respect of his peers, and Sherlock had none of that. He failed to see what the difference was between the two of them, Sherlock just seemed to always rub people the wrong way. And David was more consistently charming. Sherlock had tried to copy him, but he could only sustain it for about five minutes before his more abrasive nature came through.

But David was abrasive too. Abrasive and brilliant. But he only showed his cruelty behind closed doors. In private. He'd trained himself well. It wasn't that Sherlock admired him, but he knew enough to be wary.

'Pick the game, if you like.'

'That confident, are you.' Sherlock said, flat. Still, a germ of triumph had become a seed that took root. If he picked the game, he'd be more likely to win, and oh, wouldn't that be something?

And the scene changed, coalesced and pulled apart like someone kneading dour coloured dough. Sherlock in David's room, choked on too much vodka and bourbon, 'something to numb your senses after the loss.' He didn't know what was worse, that he'd _lost, _or that he was standing here, now, wondering why he'd been so stupid, stupid, _stupid_ to agree to this stupid game. He wanted to call Mycroft. Run away. Sink into the ground. And hate, like tar, spread across his skin and at first he thought it was David, he hated _David, _but as he watched David shrug off his shirt easily, he realised that he'd been wrong. Again. Of course he hated David, but that black tar feeling wasn't for David, it was what he felt for himself.

'I'm not going to enjoy this. I'm not interested in fornication.' Sherlock heard himself say, the fumes of his own breath stinging his eyes.

'Don't care.' David said, chirpily. He'd abandoned all the charm he'd displayed during the game itself, and there was a hard, dead edge to his gaze.

'I don't understand what you're going to get out of this.'

'I think you do.' David said, walking up to Sherlock now, his breath clear of everything but the mild scent of beer from the one pint he'd had. Sherlock had expected David to celebrate with drugs and binge-drinking, but David had murmured too intimately that he'd wanted to be as sober and clear-headed as possible for _this _experience, and Sherlock had excused himself to throw up.

He reminded himself that he could just _leave. _They had a confidentiality clause, of all things. If Sherlock had won, David was to leave university and take gainful employment for at least one calendar year in a fast food restaurant. If David won, Sherlock was his. For a night. No cuts, abrasions, transmission of STDs, nothing bareback. They'd drawn up paperwork. It was probably not legally binding, but it did state that the winner could not tell anyone else what the terms were. In other words, David could not brag to his friends in the morning. Sherlock could not remind everyone in earshot of David that he was working in a McDonald's because he'd lost a bet.

He could _leave. _Any sane person would, surely. He raised his arms mechanically as David finished unbuttoning Sherlock's shirt and pulled it, not ungently, off his shoulders.

But he couldn't leave. It wasn't even a matter of pride. He'd _lost. _His intelligence was the one thing he thought that might make him matter, and David had beaten him in a contest of wills. When it came down to it, he'd known _more. _And the black tar swum up and muffled his breathing and made his eyesight blurry and in that moment he wanted to submit to all of that hatred. All of it. He was shaking when David brought his hands to the buttons of his fly, the buckle of his belt.

'What kind of monster are you, that you could take someone unwilling to bed? Rape them?' Sherlock heard himself say, even as he flushed with an embarrassed, humiliated heat as David took his flaccid length into his hand, weighed him.

'Countries are _proud _of their spoils of war, Holmes,' David said on a voice that was more hunger than anything else, 'and if I had a museum to put you in, I'd do it. I'd display you the way England displays her seized diamonds and paintings and gems. You are the spoils of our war, and I'm no more a monster than any conquering country. Besides, it's not so bad, is it? It's not as though anyone will know.'

But David's eyes were gleaming as he said it. He knew – as well as Sherlock did – that wasn't the point. It wasn't about whether other people would know. It was about this event. This loss. The consequences of that loss.

'I'm not nearly drunk enough for this.' Sherlock said, voice slurred, as he was pulled by the wrist to the bed. It was the closest he could come – in that moment – to saying, _I made a mistake, I don't want to do this. I didn't expect to lose. _

'Well, I don't want you _unconscious.' _David laughed then, and then his expression sobered. Easy to do, as he _was _sober.

'I have a notion of what you feel right now. I thought about it. I thought about what I'd do if I lost. But unlike you, I didn't underestimate my opponent. I knew there was a chance I wouldn't win. I considered. I thought if you'd won, I might have to kill myself. But I also knew it was _worth _it. Worth it for this moment. And you knew too, you knew there was a risk, and you knew – or hoped – it would be _worth _it. The hate is mutual, after all. Didn't it feel good, at the beginning, when you thought you'd win? Couldn't you see it? Me flipping burgers and wasting my scholarship for you.'

And then David's eyes had turned flinty hard, black holes with pretty green irises, and he'd said:

'Now _come here.' _

After that, everything was either blurred or in sharp relief. The alcohol dulled a lot of it, and he was sure it would have hurt a great deal more if he hadn't been rendered so lax by the power of fermented rye and wheat.

It wasn't the penetration that had been the worst part, no. David had been attentive and patient, and while Sherlock's cheeks were still damp where they had been pushed into the pillow, that hadn't been the worst part.

The worst part had started when he'd made to leave immediately afterwards and David had held him back.

'The whole night. It's in the contract.'

'But...what..._more _could you want?' And his voice was weak and slurred, his whole body felt too large, too small, unwired, disarticulated.

Large hands pulled him back to the bed and bewildered, he'd lain as still as possible while David had pressed open wet-mouthed kisses along his jawline, while fingers squeezed into his shoulders; first affectionately, and then too hard, causing a pain that made him hiss and try and squirm away.

And really, the worst part had been when David, understanding perfectly well that Sherlock wasn't remotely interested in sex, would never be remotely interested in sex, had set about to wring every last shred of arousal he could from Sherlock's body. Taking Sherlock in hand, he'd worked him with an easy, firm rhythm that he could keep up for an inordinately long time – which he had to, in the end, because Sherlock was determined to hold out in this, to not give him this, to not give him _this, _which was his and his alone and he hadn't planned on giving to anyone ever – and in the end Sherlock had begged. Begged him to stop.

'Winner takes _all,' _David had hissed, and Sherlock knew then, he knew that this had been David's aim all along. And he'd been so stupid. So bad at reading people, with their intent to harm and hurt. David had been playing the long game. David, who – unlike Sherlock – wanted more than just dissecting dead bodies and forensics and chemistry. David who wanted Sherlock writhing on the bed, trying to get away, regretting _everything. _His whole life, this moment, _everything. _

Sherlock who, when he came, experienced a terror and dissociation so profound he might as well have blacked out.

Because after everything, even after David's machinations, he still – ultimately – hated himself, his body, his mind. His mind for not _getting _it, his foresight for not spotting a predator more powerful than he'd thought, his body for responding, _responding, _and his mind again for his ordinariness in this. Because he knew that it happened. He knew that it happened for some people during sexual assault, and it just made him aware of his ordinariness, his dullness. It excoriated his tenuous, fragile ego from the inside out.

And then everything had gone black.

David had soothed him, afterwards. It wasn't genuine, it was more condescending than anything, but it was all he would get, and Sherlock lay in the bed shaking and wondering when 'the whole night,' would end.

Still. After all that, David was true to his word. He abided by the confidentiality clause. He never told anyone. It had been their little secret.

* * *

Sherlock woke up with a violent jolt that sent slides and a microscope and books and a keyboard clattering onto the floor. Glass tinkled and smashed, the wireless keyboard clattered and the back fell open, scattering batteries across the floor. The microscope – sturdier than it looked – still broken in two upon the ground.

He stared at it all blankly, and then didn't have enough time to make it to a toilet before he purged the toast and the tea and maybe even the paracetamol into a wastepaper basket.

His mind gathered knowledge even though his body was doing nothing but hammering emotions of dread and fear and anguish through him. Only half an hour had passed, his inner alarm clock had listened to him. There was no one in the labs. It was 3.31am. He wanted to call John, and he didn't. He wanted to find a dark corner to sit in. He wanted to get high. And more than that, he didn't want to know, he didn't want to know, he didn't want to _know _any of this.

* * *

4.30am found him sprawled in a damp alley, back against a slick wall. He'd resisted temptation, he'd not bought anything, but he didn't want to go home, and he didn't want to stay in the lab to answer for the mess he'd made, and alleys were familiar and dark and comforting. They were places where people didn't look for him. Places where he could sit, and breathe, and count rows of bricks and name the species of cockroaches running across his feet.

He went through John's messages.

_Come home. _

_Doctor's orders._

_Tonight was fine. I didn't want anything more. I didn't mean to crowd you. I was worried. _

_I'm making an ass of myself, as usual._

_I hope you realise that your storming out like this is a classic symptom of avoidance, right? It's another tick in the column of you having some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder. For all that it is a large spectrum and some of your symptoms are non-standard._

_If you give yourself another migraine, I'm sending you to A&E and they can deal with you._

_I don't mean it. Come home. _

_Seriously. Doctor's orders._

* * *

And then it was 5.34am and he was cold, and shaking, when he finally called John. 5.34am when the part of his brain that wanted quiet and solitude lost the battle with the part of his brain that wanted _John _and 221B Baker Street and Mrs. Hudson fussing and tea and toast because now he _was _hungry.

'Sherlock?'

'John, I-'

'My god, are you okay? Where are you?'

'I'm okay, yes.' Sherlock said, though neither of them were convinced.

'I can hear your voice, you're not okay, you daft, idiotic...' a pause, '_where _are you?'

'What if I told you it was rape, John? The 'it will get worse before it gets better?' What if some of that 'worse' was rape?'

'What? What are you talking about?' Blessed non-understanding followed by realisation. 'Jesus. Just tell me where you are. You haven't gone and done something stupid have you? Of course you have.' John was rambling now. Panic-rambling. 'Probably bleeding and strung out in a ditch somewhere.'

'Not bleeding, not strung out,' Sherlock said, his tone as even as it could be with the shaking of his voice, 'but cold. An alley. Needed some time to think.'

'I'm coming to get you.' The sound of a door opening, closing. Footsteps. John would have no idea where to go. Sherlock staggered to his feet and straightened his coat.

'No.'

'No? Come on, Sherlock, this is-'

'I'll come to you. Stay there.' Sherlock hung up and put his phone away, and it already started vibrating again in his coat pocket. He ignored it. He was only a short walk from Baker Street anyway.

* * *

**author's note: **See? Aaaaaaaaaaangst. Reviews make me write more, I'd write you an academic paper about it, but it would be very biased. ;)


	7. Chapter 7

**07**

John spent five full minutes hesitating on the landing, unsure whether he should go outside and what, launch himself at Sherlock as soon as he saw him? It wouldn't work. But he couldn't bring himself to go back up the stairs, back into the flat either. He knew that Sherlock heard him stamping down the stairs. Would Sherlock be expecting him to come outside? It took him five minutes to realise that he was probably dealing with his distress by panicking. It was entirely unlike him. As he jogged back up the stairs again, and let himself back into the flat, it occurred to him that he was thrown for a loop here. This wasn't something that he could fix by digging into his medical kit for the right drugs, it couldn't be fixed with his training. It couldn't even be fixed by his – usual – willingness to be calm in a crisis. Helplessness, he'd experienced a bit of it, and he pretty much hated it every time. He clenched his left hand hard. It was a pre-emptive gesture.

The next fifteen minutes were agonising. He felt like an unwelcome piece of furniture in the flat. It didn't feel right to sit at the kitchen table. It didn't feel right to sit in his chair, to wait on the couch. It didn't feel right to stand by the window and watch hawk-eyed for a tall figure. The events of the entire evening kept playing through his head. That last phone call. He still couldn't quite shake the feeling that Sherlock had gone and done something stupid. Nothing would surprise him, at this point.

_What if I told you it was rape, John? _

'Jesus, Jesus.' John breathed, and then just like that, the words were enough to defuse the building tension inside of him. It was easy to forget, sometimes, being swept up in Sherlock's rapacious energy, that the past few days, weeks, had been tough on him too. His sleep cycle was uncomfortably disturbed, he'd had to put some of the small rituals that kept him grounded after the war aside to make sure that he could keep an eye on Sherlock, because he couldn't be trusted to keep an eye on himself. John was aware of the irony; neglecting his own physical health for the sake of someone who also neglected his own physical self.

He heard the sounds of someone entering the building. And then instead of the usual speedy rush of sure steps, it was a slower, heavier pace. Still precise. Still Sherlock. But off. John took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly when the door opened.

Sherlock faced him, haggard, tired, eyes fretfully sharp. There was a smell of damp and earth and something unmistakeably _alleyway _about him, and he had gone pallid from cold. He was shaking.

'You look a right mess.' John heard himself say, and Sherlock's lip quirked in a tiny mockery of a smile. He couldn't hold it though, his lips shaking back into a frown.

'I'm going to draw a bath.' Sherlock said, unwilling to shed his thick coat as he walked into the bathroom, a sign of how cold he was. John turned and watched him, wanting to do it for him, finding himself unable to move. The sound of taps running, being adjusted to perfect Sherlock temperature (almost entirely hot) filled the flat with noise. There was no safe way of dealing with this. No phrase or absence of phrase that might cause Sherlock to explode, or respond in silence, or reply evenly. He didn't want to do harm to the man. No further harm, at any rate.

'A shower would be faster.' John called, after a moment.

'Yes, John, I'm well aware.' Sherlock said, walking out of the bathroom and picking up John's medical kit from a side table. John watched, feeling strangely paralysed, as Sherlock took out some paracetamol, and then a vial of sumatriptan, and then a clean syringe. He watched as Sherlock efficiently ripped open the sterilised package, weighed out an accurate amount of the drug, and it was only when Sherlock started thumping at his own veins that John was mobilised into action.

'What? No. What are you doing?' John said, reaching for the syringe at the same time that Sherlock moved his trembling hand above his shoulder and out of the way.

'It isn't obvious?' Sherlock said, sounding vaguely amused.

'Sherlock, give me the bloody needle.' Something in Sherlock's eyes flickered, a momentary uncertainty. He must have sensed how serious John was, because he reluctantly handed everything over, and then stood, awkward, still trembling.

'Were you… Did I?' John's mouth closed. Frustration was burning in his gut. He decided to try again. 'Did I imagine that conversation at all? You in an alleyway? Terrible night? Another horrendous flashback? Are we not going to talk about it?'

'I was hoping to warm up first.' Sherlock said, his tone cold and crisp. Face expressionless. John felt that it was those times when Sherlock responded to genuinely sensitive subject matters with such emptiness, that he was showing his hand plainly. Most people couldn't pick it for the distress it was, but John could.

'And dope yourself up. You could've fallen asleep in the tub.'

'I thought it was imperative that I self-monitor my symptoms so that you could-'

'Do you have, do you have _any _idea what sort of night I've had?' John said, unable to stand this attempt at pathetic small talk any longer. 'This isn't, do you think this is so easy for me? I'm your friend, Sherlock, I think I'm your _only_ friend who knows these sorts of things about you, and I have no idea…' John trailed off and shook his left hand, shook the tremor out of it in the hopes that it would help. It didn't. He fisted it by his side again and Sherlock's eyes rested there, forehead knitted together, mouth pursed. He swallowed when Sherlock walked up to him.

'Show me your hand.'

'It's not necessary.' John forced out between clenched teeth. God, this was humiliating. He wanted to be stronger, needed to be stronger, but he had come to need certain things in his life in order to function. He had come to depend on the cases, on Sherlock's galvanised sense of action. Mycroft had picked it all that time ago, the bastard. He liked the fight, his blood-rushed at the thought of the battle. But this was no battle that he could fight with the tools he had at his disposal.

Sherlock took his wrist, turned the fist palm upwards. He squeezed John's hand impatiently, silently asking him to relax the hand, to show the tremor. Sherlock leaned close enough that John smelled something distinct on his breath.

'You threw up?' He heard himself say, as he reluctantly allowed his hand to unclench, allowed Sherlock to see the tremor. Sherlock's mouth thinned. Closed over the vapours of his exhales. But it was too late.

'Everything you ate?' John pressed.

'And some of the paracetamol, I expect.' Sherlock said grimly. He hadn't let go of John's wrist yet. John was hyperaware of the touch. He didn't like people standing too close unless he initiated it. He didn't like the cold, too-cold fingers pressing against his pulse, watching the tremor and monitoring it. He tolerated it because it was Sherlock, and he tolerated it because it was an anchor point between the two of them and damn it, Sherlock wasn't the only one who needed that right now. It reminded him that Sherlock was here, and that he was worried about him too. And John didn't want Sherlock to worry, but he _did_, and dealing with the dissonance was its own personal nightmare.

'Where did you go?'

'St. Barthes. Research.'

'Flashback?' John's voice was curt, but only because he wanted to get as much information as he could, as quickly as he could. It was the efficiency of a medical doctor out in the field.

'I slept. An intrusive memory masquerading as a nightmare.' Sherlock's voice was lower now, quieter. He eased his fingers from John's wrist, started to let go, but John turned his fingers and grasped Sherlock's wrist instead. Pressed his fingers against his pulse. Felt it racing beneath the pads of his fingers and couldn't even summon the will to feel shocked that Sherlock was masking this physiological response to the events of the evening. He expected Sherlock to shake him off, but instead his tense arm went limp, and he seemed to deflate. John thought they might be dangerously close to holding hands like this.

He hadn't been able to erase the memory of Sherlock's responses to his touches earlier, either, when they'd very firmly crossed the line from medical attention to physical care. He could still feel the ghost of Sherlock's skin against his palm and fingers, the softer curls at the nape of his neck. It wasn't in John's nature to be affectionate, but he found that in the face of Sherlock's sheer need for touch, a starburst of responding feeling spread through his chest and he just wanted to give however much he could. He supposed it made sense that Sherlock would be starved for such a basic requirement; he held himself separate from others, and John couldn't imagine that his childhood was filled with a wealth of cuddles and gentle touches. But he never thought that he would be in a position to be able to help. And he never thought he would be in a position where he _wanted _to.

A large part of him wanted to draw Sherlock to the sofa, sit him down, and simply be there next to him. For whatever Sherlock needed. He wasn't sure when the friendship had evolved into this, and he didn't know why he had flowed with that evolution so easily.

'I should make you something to eat.' John said.

'Breakfast? It's about time.'

'I'm getting too old for staying up all night,' John said with a rueful smile, yawning. Sherlock chose that moment to step away, just far enough that John could no longer hold his wrist without taking a step forward. Sherlock was looking pensively at the wall, lost in his own thoughts. He really did look like he'd gone through hell. John yawned again and listened to the sound of the water running into the tub. It didn't sound like it needed to be checked just yet. He might lack Sherlock's sense of forensic observation, but he had gotten the hang of 221B with all its little quirks rather quickly.

'Right then,' John said, watching an unresponsive Sherlock. He grimaced. Given the events of the night, it didn't surprise him that Sherlock had drifted off like this. Sherlock tended to disassociate more frequently, the more tired he was.

'Okay.' He said to himself, and walked off into the kitchen to look through the cupboards for something to make. They were well stocked, and he decided on a tin of soup. It would be high in sodium, but he figured that some of that sodium would at least be converted into electrolytes so it wouldn't be all bad. He kept turning to check on Sherlock as he rummaged around for dishes and a saucepan that looked like it hadn't recently been used in unsavoury science experiments. Sherlock wasn't responding at all now, completely withdrawn. John decided to let him be, instead of push, he knew that such profound withdrawal – in small doses – was not such a bad thing. He tended to think of it as Sherlock's 'sleep mode.' A computer slowly ticking over in order to conserve energy.

He put the soup on a low heat and then went to check the bath. It was filling nicely, and he turned off the taps. The steam was warm around him, and he inhaled deeply of the moisture. He needed a good night's sleep. He didn't have to be at the clinic today, having asked for some time off precisely so he could keep an eye on Sherlock. But he needed to keep an eye on himself too. In an ideal world, he could stay up, he could be there when Sherlock came back to himself, he would have the energy to do everything he needed to do, but he simply didn't. He was exhausted. He yawned again.

He set out a clean towel, and then walked back into the kitchen and turned the burner off, and left the soup in the saucepan, in case it would need reheating. He poured a glass of water and lay out two paracetamol tablets, and then packed up his medical kit. He walked back into the lounge and faced Sherlock. He couldn't bear to interrupt him, leaving him to the only mental rest it seemed he could bear. Instead, he took two of the thick, cosy blankets that were folded up at the end of the couch and shook them both out. He lay down and curled up, feeling himself sinking into sleep already, the night catching up with him. He didn't even have the energy to feel guilty. If his earlier panic had taught him anything, it was that dealing with this situation in a state of fatigue wouldn't help anyone. He just hoped Sherlock would come back to himself in time to appreciate the hot bath.

* * *

When he woke up, he sensed it might be around midday. Light suffused the room. Outside, the noises of busy traffic and people about their business reached muted, into the flat. His body ached with the pains that always plagued him after a few hours of sleep. The slow throb of stiffening scar tissue in his shoulder. The general mild pain of age catching up with him. His body reminded him that although he got some sleep, it was on a couch, and it wasn't nearly long enough.

He turned at the sound of two thin pieces of glass clinking together, and turned – wincing – to see Sherlock pouring one test-tube of a coloured liquid into another. John braced himself for smoke or fire (both had happened in the past), but nothing happened, and Sherlock grunted in dissatisfaction. He put both the test tubes back into the holder and turned to face John.

'Your bed would be more satisfying to your musculo-skeletal system.'

'I deduced that for myself, thanks.'

'But you won't do it, will you?'

'Sharp as a tack, aren't you?'

'Proven brilliant on paper.' Sherlock said, truthfully, but with an exhausted, playful gleam in his eye.

John sat up and scrubbed at his eyes, and then his hair, and then wiped away a thin crust of drool from his mouth and no longer had the presence of mind to feel like he should hide these sorts of things from Sherlock, who already knew anyway. No such thing as maintain an illusion of being a non-drooler around him.

'Did you eat?'

Sherlock made a noise of assent in the back of his throat and picked up a notebook. He started to make a notation, but instead he paused with his pen resting on the page, and his eyes stopped reading. His head drooped forward a little.

'Christ, you still haven't slept have you?'

No reply was forthcoming, and John stood up. He stretched out his shoulder and back, then walked up. He looked over Sherlock's shoulder and couldn't understand the shorthand or the chemical notations and wasn't too bothered. It wasn't like chemistry was his area in highschool either. He placed a gentle hand on Sherlock's shoulder, and felt a slight tensing beneath the robe. He realised that Sherlock must have had his bath, because he'd changed into his thin pyjamas, one of the robes he wore around the house, because his hair had dried in fluffy curls.

'It's okay.' John didn't mean to say it out loud, but it's too late to take it back.

'Experiment not going according to plan, actually, but thank you for taking the time to consider it.'

'You're exhausted. Clinically. You _still _haven't slept.'

'I've gone longer without sleep.' Sherlock said, but John can hear it, a slight slurring in his words, a lack of coherency threatening even now. He casts his mind back and realises he hasn't ever seen Sherlock wait this long to sleep, before. At this point, even on a case, he would have succumbed to a few hours of a nap. He might be able to go a few days without rest, but anything beyond that, especially without a case, and the fatigue caught up quickly.

'You're not the only one who can deduce. You need to go bed.'

'Perfectly aware, thank you.'

John wants to say it, he wants to say, _it's okay to be scared. _But he can't quite bring himself to vocalise something they're both 'perfectly aware' of. He wants to tell Sherlock that he knows what it's like, to be afraid to go to sleep, to be afraid of the nightmares, even if you're logically cognisant of the fact that it's happened already and you survived, and all the other things that never feel quite so believable when intrusive memory shreds you in your unconscious. And he wants to say that of all people, he really does _know, _and that it's something they can get through together, because he was lucky enough to have someone like Sherlock help him through his own recovery, and he wants Sherlock to be lucky enough to have someone too.

Instead he tugs insistently on Sherlock's robe until he stands up, looking at John in confusion. John removes the ballpoint pen from Sherlock's hand and puts it down on table and then walks into Sherlock's room. John's still exhausted himself. He thinks that this could be a win-win. He thinks it would be wonderful to actually get some shut eye on a bed with a real mattress. _I can do this_, he thinks, _a completely platonic nap between friends on the same bed. _

Sherlock follows him and stands in a kind of stupor in his doorway.

'I won't ever fuck you.' He says, wooden, characteristically blunt.

John nods.

'If you weren't so damn _tired, _you'd already know that I feel the same way. Lie down.' John said, hoping that at some point, his logic would catch up with his instincts and he'd have something more than just 'because it's the right thing to do' as a justification for his actions.

Sherlock looks at him calculatingly. Time passes. Seconds turn into a minute, and John steadily returns the eye contact. He's being evaluated. Sherlock is weighing it up, more slowly than usual. John's shoulder is starting to stiffen again, and he is fighting the urge to roll out the ache, when Sherlock gets onto his bed, a mess of limbs and typical lack of care for how he moves his own body. He lies flat on his back, and then stares up at the ceiling.

John mimics the same posture when he lies down next to him. And then they stay like that, awkwardly, for the next few minutes. Neither of them saying anything. Sherlock resolutely _not _sleeping. John thinking, _what the hell am I doing? _And, _now I'm not tired at all. _But his body was tired, and didn't want to move. He was aware of Sherlock's presence alongside him. Tense.

'There's a surgical procedure currently available, in the US. Dr. Eugene Lipov has been working with stellate ganglion blocks, and the science seems...passable.'

'Epidurals?' John says, confused.

'Traditionally. Lipov found that when used very precisely on the cervical spine, there is an almost immediate abatement of traditional post-trauma symptoms, including intrusive flashbacks. It doesn't fix the root of the disorder, but it-'

'No.' John said, imagining Sherlock flying over, imagining the needle moving between the cervical vertebrae, imagining side effects. He gritted his teeth together.

'A problem being that it may affect my chemical drive to work on cases. There's no precise moment when the bupivacaine stops shrinking the stellate ganglia. Also, test subjects have reported that the symptoms can return. Re-application of the procedure is effective, but clearly...' Sherlock trailed off. He reached up and put his forearm over his eyes, and John turned to watch him. He had a bit of colour back, possibly because he'd eaten, or probably because he'd forcibly ratcheted his body temperature up in water that would slow-cook a lobster.

'How's your head?' John said. Sherlock paused before responding.

'I haven't the faintest.' He said softly.

'Always a good sign, that.' John lay properly on his side, reaching his free arm out, resting a hand on Sherlock's upper arm.

'Is this projection?' Sherlock said, in a faint, speculative tone, still not removing the forearm from his eyes. 'Is this what you yourself wanted? Some camaraderie? A sense of symphily with someone who understood your symptomology?'

'Does it help?' John said.

'Look what I've been reduced to.' Sherlock said, so soft then, almost inaudible. John sighed, but Sherlock hadn't finished talking. 'I don't want to be lying on this bed. _Any _bed.'

_Shit, _John thought. He squeezed Sherlock's arm. Sherlock laughed bitterly in the back of his throat.

'Isn't it funny how defective the mind can be, when influenced so profoundly by cellular memory?'

'Hilarious.' John said, swallowing.

'How quickly associations are built between one event and another,' Sherlock murmured, and moved his forearm until it became fingers pressing into his eyes. John could see the not-so-steady rise and fall of his chest. A tension in his the way he held his jaw.

'I don't want to sleep.' Sherlock said, a rushed admission. John couldn't help but wonder how much of this was fatigue loosening Sherlock's tongue. Or if it was the proximity. Sherlock had been startlingly open earlier, when John had touched him, offered something of himself first in physical exchange. But he had also been more forthcoming in the midst of an oncoming migraine. He didn't like that any of these things made Sherlock more open, since he knew Sherlock himself would rarely choose to talk like this under normal circumstances. But John hung on his every word, nonetheless.

'I don't think I can-' Sherlock's mouth snapped shut, abruptly. John completed the sentence in five different ways for himself.

'I'll be here, when you wake up.' John said. He remembered the broken, shredded voice asking him, _what if I told you it was rape, John? _His the muscles of his sternum clenched, his heart ached. He shifted closer, watching Sherlock's body language, but he didn't seem too bothered by the presence of John. So he let go of his arm and pushed at Sherlock instead, silently encouraging him to roll on his side. After a couple of seconds, Sherlock went with it.

John eased closer. Pressed his forehead into the back of Sherlock's neck, placed one hand on his shoulder. He thought about wrapping an arm around Sherlock, _holding _him. But he didn't think he was ready for that yet. He didn't know if either of them were.

'Is this okay?' John said. _This isn't reminding you of anything? Not triggering? Not completely awkward because our non-standard friendship has become even more non-standard? _

'Yes.' Sherlock said, sounding vaguely surprised at himself for answering in the positive. 'You?' He added.

'I think so.' John said, smiling.

'I think,' Sherlock starts, and then pauses. It seems to take him some time to gather up his strength to say what he wants to say next, and John braces himself. 'I think that I may have been fine with this before.'

'Before?'

'Everything.' Sherlock says, by way of explanation. And John's eyes snap open when he realises what Sherlock means. That he would have been okay with increased physical comfort even before the flashbacks. That he needed it even then. That Sherlock, with all of his distance from everyone else was starving for someone to actually reach out to him. He had – John realised – surprised him with his willingness to receive touch. John pressed his forehead closer, rubbed his hand up and down Sherlock's shoulder. And Sherlock went warm and limp next to him. John squeezed a thank you. An acknowledgement. Sherlock hummed in the back of his throat, and John realised that this proximity, this closeness, was something he never knew he wanted from a friendship, but now that he had it, he didn't want to let it go.

'I think I need to talk to someone about this.' John said, after a couple of minutes had passed.

'A therapist?' Sherlock said, his voice faintly cutting. John suspected it was more defensiveness than anything else, but he could never be sure. Sherlock was not a fan of psychologists, and he only barely tolerated Ella. And that was only after repeated insistence from John that she wasn't that bad, and that she'd actually helped him, and that the blog had actually made him feel more in touch with his life again.

'No, actually,' John took a deep breath, 'I was thinking maybe someone who's been a friend to us, in his own way. Lestrade.'

'Why are you telling me this?' Sherlock said, pushing his face back into the pillows.

'I'm…asking permission?'

Sherlock grunted something which sounded like it could be assent, but didn't actually form enough words for John to be sure.

'Was that a yes?'

'It's not like he doesn't already read about all of my apparent downsides through your daft, blasted _blog. _Honestly, John.' But John still wasn't certain. Sherlock seemed to sense this, because his next words were very much awake and clear.

'He knew me, John. He knew me a long time before you did. I daresay we weren't ever close, not _friends,' _Sherlock said the word like it was a bitter pill, and John's arms jerked and then he pressed closer. _But I am, _he wanted to say. Sherlock continued after a few moments. 'But he's still seen facets of me that can't be taken back, and it might make him a good candidate for you. Someone you can talk to. Not that you'll generate an awful lot of logic between the two of you, but that can't be helped.'

'What about you?' John said, breathing in the scent of clean Sherlock; a fresh layer of lab chemicals, including a faint whiff of iodine, the neutral scent of the fragrance-free soap that he preferred to use when bathing, and beneath that, the smells of the bed, the doona itself a patina of experiments not quite washed out of the thread count.

'What about me?' Sherlock asked, sound lax and sleepy yet again.

'Who will you talk to?'

Sherlock stiffened in his arms, and then his shoulders curled in, he tensed.

'I thought I'd been talking to you.' He said, voice definitely defensive now. And John grimaced against his own stupidity. Sherlock was opening up in the only ways that he knew how, and John wanted more, but perhaps that was only because he still hung onto outdated scripts about how to deal with trauma. He should _know _better by now. Talking to a therapist about all of his issues never got rid of his psychosomatic limp. But an adrenaline-filled night running around London with a brilliant man did. He could at least return the favour. Not so much with an adrenaline-filled night, Sherlock got plenty of those already, but by allowing Sherlock to communicate and reach out in the ways he knew how. It wasn't as though he was refusing to seek support. And John could deal with his frustration about still being in the dark about so much of what was happening, beyond what he'd actually figured out for himself, in other ways. He only had to look at where they were, in this moment, to see that Sherlock was letting him in.

'You have been talking to me.' John said softly. 'It's fine, Sherlock.'

Sherlock huffed, and then his second exhale became a long sigh. It was as though, in an instant, he had committed to the concept of sleeping in John's arms, and his body became pliant and relaxed. John marvelled at a mind so able to trust and let go despite all evidence to the contrary, because it was less than three minutes that Sherlock was asleep, breathing level and even, body weight twitching more heavily into John's.

John didn't have the skill to simply will himself into a state of sleep, it was something he'd never quite got the hang of, even though he'd seen plenty of other soldiers do it. Instead he lay there, feeling the heat of someone else's body alongside his, the familiar, comforting smell of a chemical cocktail that would have once sent him roaming through his immediate environment looking for appliances on fire, and drifted off to sleep. His last thought was that if Mrs. Hudson let herself in, he would have no idea how to even begin to explain how his dynamic with Sherlock was changing, and what it was changing into.

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**Author's Note: **Thank you for all of your wonderful reviews. They really are quite motivational, and I love them. But you know that already.


	8. Chapter 8

**Author's note: **Embarrassingly, it has taken me 8 chapters to give this story anything resembling a plot (I did warn for 'freewheeling' a few chapters ago). But I have a plot now, and a direction, and so...huzzah? Still can't promise it'll be any good though. Thankfully there are like a gazillion other excellent Sherlock/John hurt/comfort fics out there.

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**08 **

He woke up from a dreamless state. He felt John, asleep, face pressed into the sheets, though Sherlock knew that he would be dampening the threads beneath him as he tended to drool in certain positions. Sherlock's whole body ached; too long spent in stiff poses, spent crouched in an alley, locked up in flashbacks and nightmares. When there was a riveting case, pain faded into the background, became the white noise that no longer mattered and was easily ignored. Now everything was topsy turvy, he was upside down and reversed and inside out. He hadn't been entirely honest with John, about the sheer number of memories that had been coming back. Certainly, there were those that stood out from the patina of horror. Moments that were coloured more brightly, that reached more deeply into his well of emotions and spun them out.

His senses told him that someone else was in the room. He turned and looked into the dimness and saw someone who made him grimace.

_Mycroft. _

His brother raised his eyebrows in deep amusement and Sherlock slid out of bed, listening to John's breathing, hearing it remain steady and rhythmic. He wouldn't wake up. He stalked regally out of his bedroom, shoulder 'accidentally' knocking Mycroft on the way out. He didn't look behind him as he made his way into the kitchen, heard the soft click of Mycroft closing the bedroom door.

'You took a case recently,' Mycroft said, quietly, 'a _dreary _case. A _boring _one.'

Sherlock said nothing. He looked in the cupboards and finally the fridge until he found the last custard scroll that John had purchased for him. They were his favourite. But John didn't know they were his favourite pastry because they were _Mycroft's _favourite pastry. He turned around and bit into the scroll affecting a look of nonchalance, but inwardly he crowed when Mycroft's eyes narrowed in a mixture of envy and resentment.

'Low blow, dear brother.'

'Want some? They're delicious at this time of year. In season.'

Mycroft made an aborted gesture with his eyes that suggested he was about to roll them, and instead he rested his briefcase on the table and looked concertedly away from the pastry.

'You took a case and didn't solve it within the thirty seconds it would normally have taken you to resolve. I know your wealth of knowledge about moulds well, after all, don't I? I clearly recall you practicing on my _dessert _a few times.'

'Mine too,' Sherlock insisted, because honestly, it was like Mycroft wanted to make everything into an insult when it wasn't necessary. There was enough bad blood between them, enough insults that he didn't need to melodramatically consign more to the pile. And as always, he was offended that Mycroft felt the need to keep up with every single one of his cases, especially as the man could figure out so many of them himself anyway. Scotland Yard's solve rate would improve exponentially if they had Mycroft go over the cold cases.

'You weren't prevaricating in your delayed resolution of the crime because of ulterior motives, after all. Sources confirm that you were researching fungi in the early hours of this morning. Brushing up?'

Sherlock had difficulty swallowing the next bite of pastry, and then didn't take another, just in case. He could see where this was going. Mycroft, the bastard, so good at deduction and yet always directing it in the worst possible ways. He put the scroll down on the bench-top and folded his arms.

'I can't possibly see how this is any of your business.'

'Oh, au contraire,' Mycroft said, with a small smile, 'replacing knowledge missing from your vaunted mind palace? At first I thought head trauma, perhaps a degenerative disease of the mind, but of course that would be my first conclusion; since we who so desperately rely on our brains fear these things no matter how irrational the fear, don't we?'

Sherlock waited.

'And then I thought about _incidents _you have experienced recently; we've all read John's blog, and I have my own team supplementing that information further, of course.' There was a pause, and Sherlock placed his palms on the bench behind them, pressed down to literally brace himself for what was coming. Frustrating, because he had been stripped of so much of his usual self-control, hard to find it and rely on it when it was being eroded from the inside out. Mycroft, too damned smart for his own good, of _course _he'd figured this all out for himself. It didn't help. Mycroft was not the pillar of support he imagined himself to be.

'You, Sherlock, reduced to physiological post-trauma? How dull. Do you need your own Ella? Or is your own choice of 'therapy,' Mycroft's eyes drifted mockingly to Sherlock's bedroom, as though he could see the still form of John sleeping there, 'working for you?'

'Get out,' Sherlock hissed, and Mycroft's eyes pinned Sherlock, sharp now, all mocking having evaporated, something raw and bright and deceptively like _concern _beneath them.

'Of course, one always hopes one is wrong,' he said. He sighed and averted his eyes to the pastry scroll on the bench, and then looked quickly away to the experiments on the table. His eyes roved curiously. Chemistry had never been his department, but he still had a basic working knowledge. Sherlock himself catalogued in turn; new shoes, more fashionable than average, certainly more fashionable than Mycroft preferred, a high price-tag and fine leather workmanship. Who was Mycroft trying to impress? He wore expensive shoes often, but rarely anything fashionable, being someone who preferred tried and true patterns in his couture. Who would even rather commission someone to copy a redundant style rather than trying something new. So then someone who would see Mycroft at work, perhaps on a regular basis. Someone who might notice his shoes. It was uncharacteristically vain of him.

'How do you find the time to court someone, with all of your political machinations?'

Mycroft's eyes stopped flickering over the experiment, and then he looked up with a smile.

'It's good to know that mind of yours hasn't been entirely laid to waste. Which is why I'm here. I have a case that I'd like you to consider.'

'Thank you, no.'

'I don't have anyone else I'd like to be looking at the material, currently. I suspect I have a leak in the upper echelons of my establishment, and my own...sedate methods of deduction have only lead me to believe that someone more suited to gallivanting around London would be appropriate.'

Sherlock grimaced. The timing of Mycroft's visit, his perpetual lifetime evasion regarding sensitive personal matters alongside his unwillingness to see Sherlock suffer through anything; even if it meant burying his head in the sand for the majority of his childhood. Sherlock was well aware that Mycroft had personal issues with not having done _more. _

'You come to me with lies, thinking that will fixme? Give me a case to pique my interest, think that all I need is some brisk, polluted outdoor air and a quick run around and I'll be fine? I thought you were _smart.' _

Mycroft shifted uncomfortably.

'There is still a leak.'

'Stopper it yourself.'

'Everything I've said is true.'

Sherlock picked up the scroll and took a spiteful bite out of it, and Mycroft actively grimaced, insulted. It was a cheap ploy. To Sherlock, the pastry was overly rich, filled with refined white sugar and flour, poor quality egg and cheap milk. He swallowed down his bite with what could only be called a triumphant look in his eye.

And then they both stared at each other. Mycroft looked uncomfortable, eager to be gone, but his stance was that of a man willing to see out a battle. Not easy for him to do this then, to offer something that might help, to acknowledge his own dismal part in Sherlock's past – what he had remembered so far, anyway. And Sherlock knew that Mycroft could see in the way he was holding himself that he was tired, in pain. Mycroft would see the tension in Sherlock's jaw that he couldn't quite seem to release these days and he could probably see the weight of it all. The terrible weight of feeling like one is losing one's mind. For Mycroft was right, they both had an irrational fear of mental degeneration, early onset Alzheimer's (there was precedent), severe head trauma, brain damage and now, added Sherlock, the chemical contraption that appeared to be what John called, 'a good case for post-traumatic stress disorder.'

'Leave the file.' Sherlock said abruptly, and Mycroft withdrew it from his briefcase and laid it smartly on the table, corner lining up neatly with the table corner. He paused then, his fingers trailing along the edge of the tabletop, and Sherlock gritted his teeth, ire rising. He was certain that he wouldn't want to hear what was coming, and after the night he'd had, he couldn't summon his usual indifference. His toes curled against the floor, and Mycroft noticed. He looked up.

'I'm not unaware of how my actions, when we were younger, impacted you,' Mycroft said, and Sherlock swallowed around nothing now, still feeling like he had pastry cloying up the back of his throat.

'Don't.'

'I may have driven you to hospital, or tended you, when necessary, but we both know that I benefitted greatly from father's displeasure in you. We both know that I took advantage of that. I was a Medean evolutionist, always have been, I believed whole-heartedly in the survival of the fittest. Not in some Wallacean principle of cooperation.'

Sherlock said nothing, he said nothing because he was certain that if he spoke, he'd be loud enough to wake John. He contemplated dipping into his trust fund to send Mycroft vans of cakes and pastries and chocolates for weeks on end. He knew it would be less than nine days before Mycroft broke and started gorging himself.

'I should have realised much, much earlier that you were such a sensitive child that this would all revisit you one day.'

Sherlock, later, would blame it on fatigue and too many bad days and the disarming effect John's presence had on him. But in the moment, all he knew was the lurch away from the kitchen bench, the aggressive step towards Mycroft.

'_Sensitive? _The man, our father_,_ made my life a...' he stopped abruptly. This was unseemly. In one moment he had been ready to spill about how much of a _nightmare _this all was. He could scramble his resources together and affect indifference, he could go on as though everything were in its perfect state of internal equilibrium, but it was _not, _and he loathed lying to himself, and he loathed that he couldn't just reconstruct the mind palace, evict Moriarty, re-delete the memories. He felt insufficient. He was _inefficient_. The knowledge that after all this time, he still couldn't get himself together, it was purely galling. He didn't want to throw the tantrum he'd been wanting to throw since this whole sorry state of affairs had begun. Not in front of Mycroft.

'The hospital staff asked me, once, where you kept getting your bruises from,' Mycroft, unusually garrulous, and Sherlock didn't want to hear any of it.

'Get out!' Sherlock shouted, pointing imperiously towards the door. He was bursting to show Mycroft the self-defence he'd learned over the years, his ability to throw a hard right hook, break a cheekbone. Mycroft saw the potential for violence and lifted his head minutely, expressionless always the calm one, always the one – pointing out through his own restrained actions – just how unrestrained Sherlock was. He picked up his briefcase and walked out briskly, and Sherlock stood and watched him, unable to move. He was trembling. _Trembling. _

He bared his teeth in a snarl of disgust at himself, at his own lack of control, and a moment later he had turned and ripped the toaster from the wall and hurled it onto the floor. The casing broke apart, and the elements lay exposed. At any other point, Sherlock would have hoarded them for future experiments, but instead he just stared at them, nostrils flaring.

John ran into the kitchen with the speed of someone desperately worried and already awake and eavesdropping and he stopped to take in the scene before him. Sherlock could hear his audible breathing. He reached for the case file and opened it, pretending to read the words in front of him, wanting something to look at so he wouldn't look up and see the disappointment on John's face. They were both men who very much appreciated toast, it was a staple in both of their lives, and this was now the third toaster Sherlock had broken in his time living with John. Though it was the first he'd broken in a fit of wrath, as opposed to, 'I needed that part, it was relevant to my interests.'

'The toaster had it coming,' John said, after a beat, 'it never toasted quite right.'

'No, it didn't.' Sherlock acknowledged, dismayed to hear the minor tremor in his voice, surprised at John's evenness. His fingers tightened on the case file and then he closed it and put it back down again.

'The first time I met Mycroft, I nearly decked him,' John said, conversationally, bending down to pick up broken pieces of toaster. He placed them all back on the spot where the whole toaster had once rested, and left them there. He approached Sherlock, and for a moment Sherlock thought – in a rush of horror – that John was going to touch him, offer comfort, but instead John opened up a cabinet door and took a glass, poured himself some water. Sherlock exhaled in relief, and maybe a little disappointment.

'How much did you hear?' Sherlock said, aware of exactly how thin and how un-soundproofed the walls were in his own bedroom. He decided that John may have woken as soon as he felt the body heat dissipating from the bed, as he was a sensitive sleeper. It could have even been the click of the door, sounding faintly similar to the catch of a safety coming off a weapon.

'Enough,' John said grimly, 'that I wanted to deck him again. I was going to give you some space, but then...toaster homicide.' John waved his hand at the broken toaster and Sherlock resisted smiling at the attempt of humour because the joke was so pathetic it didn't deserve acknowledgement.

'And I thought my childhood was bad,' John said, finally, running a hand through his hair and sounding a good deal more awake and alert than he had about five hours ago.

'It was,' Sherlock said, and John's expression became guarded. Sherlock had no desire to talk about his own deductions, having been relatively comfortable to mostly respect John's privacy about his background. Besides, revealing John's past to John would have revealed little more than John's irritation about having his privacy invaded, it would yield irrelevant information, and he wasn't interested in hurting him for irrelevant information.

'Not as bad,' John said, hesitantly, and Sherlock rolled his eyes.

'Do, please, show me this research you've done on quantifying the 'badness' of people's childhoods. I'd very much like to see it.'

'Shut up, you twat. I wasn't the one who just broke a toaster.' John's ribbing was affectionate and Sherlock's smirk became a reluctant smile, and he sat down at the table and tried not to think about how the past few hours had consisted of them both sleeping together on the same bed. He tried not to think about whatever conclusions Mycroft had drawn. However astute he could be about almost all areas of Sherlock's life, he was remarkably quick to jump to conclusions about his sex life. All this time, and Mycroft still struggled to accept asexuality as a perfectly valid reality, rather than a form of some kind of inhibited or repressed denial.

Sherlock watched as John went about his morning routine, and just as John started to walk to the bathroom to have his morning shower, Sherlock called out;

'Sun is setting in twenty five minutes. It's actually dinnertime, by your standards.'

John swore, and came back into the kitchen. He put a hand on his hip and shook his head.

'I hope you find my screwed up body clock deeply amusing.'

'It passes the time,' Sherlock said, and then, as they both continued to look at each other, John smiled almost shyly, and Sherlock nodded slightly in acknowledgement. Yes, the look seemed to say, we have just shared the same bed, and it's fine, isn't it? But just as quickly Sherlock realised _why _John had been so attentive and so physically affectionate lately and he felt himself go cold and a shiver curled up the back of his spine, piloerection made the hairs on his arms stand on end.

'_Winner takes _all,_' _David's voice hissed triumphantly throughout his mind, so present that he could practically feel the man's breath on his face, smell the light scent of alcohol mingling with his own toxic breath. He felt a slick hand on the erection he had desperately tried to will away and almost succeeded, almost, except that David _knew _and was patient, felt his sternum and ribs ache from desperate breaths and resistance against his own physical reactions.

'Sherlock?' John said, and Sherlock blinked and blinked, tried to bring the room back into the focus, aware that clamminess had turned into cold sweat, even on the backs of his thighs and behind his knees. His chest was heaving, but his was breathing silently, a remnant from a time when he didn't want David to hear him, and that reflecting a skill he'd learned so long ago – how to be frightened, terrified, breathe like your life depended on it, but still be _silent_. He waited for John to say things like, 'it's just a flashback,' and, 'it's not real,' but blessedly, he stayed silent. When Sherlock finally had the presence of mind to make eye contact, John was not looking at him in pity; Sherlock thought he saw understanding there. He hoped he wasn't fabricating an expression, human emotion had never been his strong point.

'It seems,' Sherlock said, pressing his lips together briefly, 'that sleep has given me enough energy to flashback. Fantastic,' he added.

'Ah, yes,' John said, sounding entirely familiar with the concept.

'I don't want to talk about it,' Sherlock said, and John nodded.

'Yep. You don't have to either,' he said, though he sat down at the table with Sherlock all the same.

'If I did talk about it,' Sherlock said, 'would you be a viable candidate, for that?' Sherlock remembered John saying 'who will you talk to?' and irrationally felt as though in that moment, John may have been asking him to find someone else. He looked up at John, who was looking at his own hands, clasped together on top of the table. He seemed to be searching for the right thing to say, and Sherlock had pursued eight different ways that John could gently reject him – which was likely – before John finally answered.

'This is really happening, isn't it?' John said, finally, and Sherlock's brow furrowed in confusion. 'I mean, this isn't just something that we're going to wake up from in two days time, and it's going to be gone. This is...I can't believe I was so _happy _when you thought I'd betrayed you. I'm such an idiot. Christ.' John's fingers tightened where they were locked together, his mouth pursed, and Sherlock resisted the urge to reach out and awkwardly pat John on the arm (it would never be anything but awkward, he thought, at a time like this). He wanted to tell John that he didn't actually want to talk about anything at all, so it wasn't like John had to seriously address the issue, he was just curious.

'John,' Sherlock began, but John cut him off.

'No, wait, look...yes, of course I'm someone you can talk to. I'm not saying that out of some misplaced sense of guilt, or even because I think I can fix you, though I'd be lying if I didn't wish that there was some miracle cure, and _don't _even start on about you getting a bloody needle to the back of the neck to fix your symptoms. I...care about what's happening, why wouldn't I? And, it's just, I think...' John paused, 'I think sleep, and Mycroft, these things have given me enough energy to realise that you've had some really _shitty _moments in your life and I'm not so good at feeling helpless, and you know that.' He stopped rambling, abruptly.

'You just described Mycroft as a 'thing,' Sherlock said, delighted and desperate to be away from this conversation and unwilling to stand up and leave, because John was helping him orient to the world and as loathe as he was to admit it, he wasn't willing to give up the benefits of being in his presence, for the sake of his pride. John knew post-traumatic stress disorder, even if his therapist had taken a deeply flawed approach to it, he understood what it was like to have his brain betray him. He was a stoic man, he _knew. _

'I know I'm not helpless,' John said, shaking his head at himself, 'I _know _that. But I don't like to see you in pain.'

Sherlock opened his mouth to trot out a denial. And then he thought about minimising the situation. But none of the words would resolve into whole sentences, and instead he was just left feeling deeply uncomfortable. This conversation, acknowledging _pain; _he'd spent his entire life deleting all of it and he wasn't used to the empathy of others, especially empathy that wasn't mostly pity. He didn't know the right thing to do. He looked at the file on the bench and wondered if it would be terribly rude to reach for it and announce that Mycroft had given them a case.

'I just want to help,' John said, finally.

'So long as you don't cripple yourself with guilt in the meantime. You had an ordinary human response to my thinking you were Moriarty. You can't significantly help your IQ or your belated lack of insight into the matter.'

'I feel so much better,' John said, sarcastic.

'Good,' Sherlock said, pretending that John hadn't added any derisive inflection to the statement at all. Ignoring his own twinge of mistrust, for though he could cerebrally understand that no, John was not – could never be – at fault, a part of him didn't believe it.

'Did you dream?' John said, a sudden and welcome change of subject, and Sherlock shook his head.

'Nothing I can remember. I've noticed a pattern however. After a particularly intense recollection, everything seems to abate, for a time. And perhaps...' Sherlock trailed off, because he was reluctant to say, _perhaps you sleeping next to me helped. _There was admitting vulnerability and then there was acknowledging whatever line they'd crossed into in the past 24 hours. Sherlock was still feeling it out for himself. He vaguely remembered telling John he wouldn't fuck him, and he vaguely remembered John's response, but it couldn't be so easy could it? It couldn't be so easy to assert a boundary and have it respected, surely? It seemed that too many other people in his life had heard his boundaries and treated them as battle-lines to be crossed. John was a trained soldier. Crossing boundaries was something he'd been professionally trained to do.

'Should you be taking cases?' John said, reaching over for the folder. Sherlock felt a burst of irritation and snatched it away before John could get his hands on it.

'Sleep has obviously done you some good,' John said, a hint of annoyance in his own voice, 'because you're turning into a prat again.'

'Yes, it's obvious you prefer it when I'm wrong-footed, you did enjoy it when I thought you were Moriarty, after all. Quick! Better come up with some other trauma in case I recover,' Sherlock said, shoving away the part of his mind willing to give John the benefit of the doubt, and latching onto his familiar agitation and disdain and contempt with a fierce grip. John's eyes widened with shock and he stood up as Sherlock did.

'Hang on a minute, where did that come from?' John said, indignant, and Sherlock ignored him. He decided the first order of the evening would be a shower, and then he would read the case file in his room, undisturbed.

'Sherlock!' John shouted at Sherlock's back, and Sherlock answered him with a slamming of the bathroom door.

* * *

Mycroft was right, the case did require legwork. Interviews or access to personal laptops and desktops were likely going to be the most reliable ways to get the information he needed, and – of course – because Mycroft's upper echelons mostly consisted of people used to subterfuge, obfuscation and being spied on, he'd need to be clever. Disguises were always a possibility, since it wouldn't do to risk being seen, he had no doubt that his four main suspects would have done their own research into Mycroft, would have likely learned about his wild, brilliant younger brother who didn't try especially hard to keep his face and name out of the newspapers or off the tongues of police and detectives. He knew he had a memorable face and manner. Though it did tickle him a little to think of these people, with their power and money and perhaps even intellect, perusing his website, realising that he actually _was _as brilliant as the rumours suggested.

Whoever was betraying information outside of Mycroft's inner circle of political machinations would likely already be suspecting some form of visual surveillance. Mycroft watched, and often listened, to everyone he employed. So they would be operating in a way that cameras and microphones could not detect; either geographically outside of the realm of detection (not enough travel outside Mycroft's purview to suggest this), or in manners that bypassed that detection even when it was present (computers, communicating in code, many other possibilities came to mind).

This case had a lot of potential to get Sherlock back on track, and he gritted his teeth because Mycroft would have _known _that. It required observation of human behaviour and looking for anomalous activity, as opposed to a comprehensive understanding of fungal species; the former had not been damaged and Mycroft would have known that too.

He was not tired, having slept a decent amount, and because his mind was starting to spark and fire as it always did at the beginning of a case. It was 1.00am when he emerged, dressed and ready to go out and contact his homeless network. He remembered to pocket his wallet. He'd need money for the kind of surveillance he was going to ask them to do for him. He'd need to be careful; homeless people tended to blend in by default, which came in handy, but he wasn't dealing with an average case of treason.

John was sleeping on the couch, shoulder twisted in a way that would pain him in the morning. Sherlock felt a momentary pang of some unidentified emotion that made him pause on his way out, to see John sacrificing his own comfort in order to keep an eye on him. He made it to the door before he turned around and wrote, uncharacteristically, on a piece of paper:

_Taken the case._ _Gathering data. Back in, _how long? Sherlock often lost track of time when he was on a case, unless it was particularly relevant. He crossed out the last two words and left the note on the table, where John would eventually see it.

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**Author's Note the Second: **Reviews are love. :)


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